Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

linta
—the words in this 
āyah
fascinate me. 
linta lahum
which I
keep translating as, ‘you are lenient towards them’. The word 
lāna
in Arabic is
the opposite of 
khushūnah
: ‘ruggedness and harshness’. And harshness could be
in your look, harshness could be in your speech, harshness could be in your
actions, harshness could be in your gestures, and harshness can also be in your
silence. Sometimes you’re mad at your son or your daughter and your harshness
is not that you yelled at them but your harshness is that you’re not talking to
them—that you’re not making eye contact. Sometimes the mother is upset with
the child and the mother doesn’t look at the baby but the baby knows, the child
knows—Mama’s angry. She doesn’t have to say anything but there’s a kind of
khushūnah
, a ruggedness, a roughness there because of her attitude, her facial
expression. When Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) told the Messenger (
ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi
wa-sallam
) 
linta lahum
, did He specify: how are you lenient towards them?
Rather, he left it completely open. In other words, in your speech, in your facial
expressions, in your emotions, in your interaction with them, the way you will
look towards them, all of it will have to be soft—that is the message from Allah.
Before you go into this meeting, let me prepare you—
subḥān Allāh
!
(O Prophet), it was thanks to Allah’s mercy that you were gentle to
them …
(Āl ʿImrān 3: 159)

---

A little bit more about the word 
līn
and where this word comes from. They
say in Arabic: 
talayyana
, when you give somebody compliments to make them
feel good, when you describe someone with the best qualities that they have,
they describe this as 
talayyana
. One of the implications of 
linta lahum
is: when
you go in there, highlight the good in these people. The meeting is not supposed
to be about what is good about them. The meeting is supposed to be what they
messed up with—what is bad about them—but when you go, say good things
about them. They’re depressed enough as it is, they’re embarrassed enough as it
is about what happened, they’re human beings they made a mistake, they came
to believe in you and they’ve made sacrifices for you (
ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-
sallam
) before. And yes, they made a mistake, but it doesn’t wipe away all of the
good that they have. They need a little bit of a morale boost and something they
were not expecting from you. So you need to go in there and say something nice
to each of them. 
Linta lahum
: you’re going to start this meeting by giving a
compliment.
This is incredible leadership. Executives pay millions of dollars, companies
spend all this money on executive and corporate leadership and boosting morale.
Some of you go to those boring meetings, you look at eight hundred power point
presentation slides, you fall asleep and at the end of it, ‘Yeah, we’re going to
beat the last year’s sales record. YES!’ Everybody’s in it only for the money;
that’s all artificial. At the end of the day all of it is artificial. That’s not real
leadership. Real leadership, the Prophetic model of leadership, the model of
Muhammad 
Rasūl Allāh
(
ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-sallam
) is really that people are
in servitude, they have become enslaved to those who are good to them. And
when you were least expecting that you would be good to your followers, that’s
when you were good to them—