Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

parts with two or three reminders in each. They range from the profoundly
personal questions of how we should approach Allah in our prayers, and how we
should never think ill of our fellows; to communal ills such as the unacceptable
attitude many Muslim communities have towards daughters, despite the explicit
teachings of the Prophet that honour daughters, and women generally.
Ustādh
Nouman’s work is also an excellent example of what Muslim
communities and their scholars need to do in reaching out to a global audience
through the building of institutions like Bayyinah, and the harnessing of modern
social media to reach people from all walks of life. It is immensely important
that modern Muslims and, in particular, Muslims in the West, invest in
institutions that will promote sound Islamic teachings to counteract the rise in
extremism that has engulfed parts of the world where traditional institutions of
learning have been reduced to ruin by imperial wars and corrupt scholars.
It is hoped that this work will contribute to inspiring modern Muslims to
become sources of light in our world through the revival of their hearts, and the
reorientation of their outlooks towards greater social responsibility and greater
God-consciousness.
The Editor, Kube Publishing Ltd.
January 2017

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CHAPTER 1
A Prayer for Desperate Times
I
n this reminder, 
in shā
’
 Allāh taʿālā
, I would like to share with you some
reflections on an 
āyah
from 
Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ
, the twenty-eighth surah of the
Qur’an. The story of 
Mūsā
(
ʿalayhi al-salām
) is mentioned in many places in the
Qur’an. In this particular place, Allah is telling us about the part of his life
before he speaks with Allah on the mountain of Ṭūr. Glimpses of the life of
Mūsā
(
ʿalayhi al-salām
) before that event are captured in 
Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ
. One of
those events is when he escaped Egypt and made it into Madyan. He escaped
because he was wanted for murder; even though it was a mistake. He had
punched someone, and they had died by accident. He had escaped the city,
escaped Egypt because they were looking for him and were going to kill him if
they found him. The order was ‘shoot to kill’.
Allah guided him through the desert and He got him all the way to the waters
of Madyan. Madyan is in the middle of the desert but it has some waters, some
lakes and ponds, so he ends up over there; finally sitting, getting some relief,
drinking some water. Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) tells us that:
… he found there a crowd of people watering their flocks, and he
found apart from them two women holding their flocks back …
(Al-Qaṣaṣ 28: 23)

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He found a group of people that were giving their animals drink and besides
them he saw two women who were pulling on their animals. In other words, up
on top of the hill there are two young ladies that had some animals but they are
not letting their animals drink the water, while all the rest of the village is
feeding their animals water: their sheep and their goats and their camels and
their cows are all drinking water. But these women with their sheep, they are just
tugging away at them. Obviously the sheep see the water so they want to go
drink; but they’re not going, they are staying in place.
He sees this scene so he goes up to them and says:
… He asked the women: “What is it that troubles you?” They said:
“We cannot water our flocks until the shepherds take their flocks
away, and our father is a very old man.”
(Al-Qaṣaṣ 28: 23)
‘What’s wrong with you two? What’s the situation here?’ And they said,
‘We don’t give our flock drink from this pond until the entire flock of the people
is done’. What they are trying to say is we don’t want to go among those men
because a lot of them are perverts; they don’t respect women. They howl at us or
they harass us so we would rather all of these people finish, because they are a
bunch of idiots, and then we will do our work. Our father is an old man: and one
of the meanings of the