Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

āyah
are: 
wa-lā taqtulū anfusakum
—
and don’t kill each other. What is Allah saying? When financial corruption goes
rampant, you will find in a society that heinous crimes also rise. Financial
corruption leads to other types of crime. 
Subḥān Allāh
! That is what Allah is
preventing us from—
wa-lā taqtulū anfusakum.
And whoever does this by way of transgression and injustice We shall
surely cast him into the Fire; that indeed is quite easy for Allah.
(Al-Nisā’ 4: 30)
‘And whoever does that out of animosity and wrong doing, [in other words
commits murder, or does something that leads to murder,] then We will throw
them into the fire and that’s easy for Allah to do.’ Now why would Allah use
such harsh language? Allah is not even talking about ‘disbelievers’ being thrown
into the fire. Allah is saying in the beginning: 
Yā ayyuhā alladhīna āmanū
—‘Those of you who believe’, when you become corrupt I have no problem
throwing you also. Don’t just wear your faith on your sleeve. Don’t just call
yourself a Muslim and not represent any of its teachings. You’re not going to get
away with that. This faith of ours isn’t just a declaration, it has to be a lifestyle

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choice. It has to be a way we do business; it has to be a way in which we deal
with each other. 
Subḥān Allāh
, it’s very powerful.
Now I come to the last 
āyah
that I wanted to share with you, but before I do,
one more beautiful thing, why did Allah give us these regulations anyway? It’s
the 
āyah
before that I didn’t even share with you where He says:
Allah wants to lighten your burdens, for man was created weak.
(Al-Nisā’ 4: 28)
‘Allah wants to lighten your burden for you, and the human being was
created weak.’ I am giving you these principles because if you abide by them
you will have an easier life. Here you are thinking if you can make an extra
buck, by hook or by crook, that you will have an easier life, but Allah is saying
let me tell you: when you make that money in the wrong way, it will come back
to haunt you eventually. You’ll pay the price for it, maybe in your personal life,
in your family life because that money is cursed. It’s cursed.
And by the way when Muslims earn money from questionable sources, and
then we feel guilty, and we donate to the masjid a part of it. Because we feel
guilty. So the guy’s running a liquor store—absolutely haram—with a lotto
machine on top, right? And he’s got the 
Āyat al-Kursī
behind the cash register,
so everything should be okay. Well, it’s not okay. He’s running this liquor store
and he feels guilty, so he comes in Ramadan and drops a ten thousand dollar
cheque to the masjid. That money is dirty and when that money goes into the
masjid, into building the walls of that masjid, to cleaning the carpet of that
masjid, you shouldn’t be surprised that years down the line there are fights
happening inside that masjid, and nobody is showing up, and there are all kinds
of quarrels, and people don’t like each other, and there is all this tension and,
and....
Why? because good money comes with 
barakah
, good money comes with
blessings and bad money comes with 
laʿnah
. It’s cursed. It has no 
barakah
in it,
nothing good comes of it. Nothing good can come from something that is evil to
begin with; you cannot eat something that is not good for you and expect good
results, right? You cannot put poison in your mouth and expect to get healthy;

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you can’t do it, it doesn’t make any sense. The world of 
īmān
is like that too.
You cannot earn something haram, something questionable, and put it to
something good and expect good things will happen; they won’t. It doesn’t work
that way, that’s not Allah’s law—