Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

 tawāṣī
bi-l-Qur’ān
. In other
words, they advise each other with the ultimate truth. They don’t beat around the
bush. Part of fixing our relationships, all of our friendships, family relationships,
your relationship with your parents, your relationship with your children, part of
that is honesty. There are so many people who don’t honestly tell their parents
that they’re being hurt. They don’t honestly tell their children that their words
are hurting them. They don’t honestly tell their husband or their wife how they
truly feel, they’re not honest about it. And you know why they don’t say it,
because they say well if I’m honest then it might create a fight. If I tell people
how I really feel, they might get really angry at me. Let me tell you, when you
keep bottling your emotions up, that’s not 
ṣabr
. You’re collecting more
gunpowder and eventually it will explode. Eventually it’s all going to come out
and it’s going to get really ugly.
We have to get in the habit of being honest with each other in our
relationships—using the truth in our relationships—yet at the same time
maintaining a demeanour of love and respect. Maintaining a demeanour of
concern for the other. I am equally concerned for my mother as I am for myself.
Some of you sons reading this today, your mothers want you to get married to
someone you don’t want to get married to, for example. And you’re like, ‘I
shouldn’t say anything, it’s my mum, and I shouldn’t say anything’. Actually
you should, but lovingly. ‘Mum, I don’t like her. I love you; you can beat me,
here’s a shoe. Just beat me, but I don’t like her. I can’t do it.’ And girls the same
way, you have to speak up. It doesn’t mean, ‘I’m NOT going to do it mum, you
DON’T UNDERSTAND ME!’. No, no. That’s not 
tawāṣī
either, you have to
keep a loving demeanour. You have to keep a respectful demeanour, but that
doesn’t mean you shy away from saying the truth. That is what is necessary in

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all of our relationships.
If we can learn to do that in our families then we can slowly learn to do that
at the level of community. Then we can become people that can take criticism
because we are not giving criticism in a nasty, ugly, mean way; in an insensitive
way. We are doing it because we have already developed a kind of bond with
each other where we can speak honestly with each other. We can have criticism
going back and forth with each other and it’s fine. All human beings recognize
that they make mistakes. The only way they grow is if they learn from one
another, 
subḥān Allāh
.
So I pray that Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) helps us fulfil this beautiful, simple and
yet comprehensive advice of 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
. O Allah, make us of those who
believe (
alladhīna āmanū
), do righteous deeds (
wa-ʿamilū aI-ṣāliḥāt
), and are
people of 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
and 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ṣabr
. Āmīn!

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CHAPTER 4
Assumptions
I
n 
Sūrat al-Ḥujurāt
, the forty-nineth surah, there is a list of timeless Muslim
morals, Muslim principles that, if we abide by them, teach us how to live
together as a healthy society. These principles aren’t just about how Muslims are
supposed to treat each other but also about the way we deal with all of humanity.
How we’re supposed to be with the people around us. Each one of them is
probably the subject of a reminder on its own, which is why instead of giving
you the entire list and walking you through all of those principles,