Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

aʿṭihim mithāl
—give them an example. Rather, He says: 
wa-ḍrib lahum
mathalan
. What does that mean? 
Ḍaraba
in Arabic means ‘to strike’, and this
figure of speech is used in Arabic when you say something that is going to have
an impact.
You know when something hits something; it causes a noise, it creates a
disruption and everybody’s attention goes that way. If you’re sitting in your
office, quietly working and you hear a crash outside. You’re going to look out
the window promptly because something hit something else and immediately the
noise gets your attention. You’re going to sleep at home and you hear something
fall in the kitchen; immediately you think what’s going on over there? Let me go
and check what’s happening. The striking of something is actually a cause of
attention—
khudh al-intibāh minhum
— take their attention; grab their attention
when you give the example. What Allah is teaching us is that there are
opportunities when we can get each other’s attention. There are other times
when you can talk to somebody and give them an example or try to give them
naṣīḥah
and advice, but their attention is somewhere else, that’s not the right
time to give them advice.
A lot of times I’ll go to a nikah, or a 
walīmah
, or something like that; and
people are enjoying each other’s company, they are eating food, kids are running
around, and they say: ‘Brother, give a talk’. People are eating, they are talking to
each other, somebody’s on the cell phone. This is not the time. This is not the
time, because they are not going to pay attention. The kids are screaming in the
back, there are people that are already engaged in their own conversation; you

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have to find the right time to give the advice, the right time and right setting to
give the advice. I’m not saying that setting has to be the masjid alone, but you
have to be intelligent enough to know when is a good time to talk about
something that will actually carry impact. You’re trying to give a brother advice
and he’s on the phone. That’s probably not a good time. Let him finish his
conversation; let him not be busy with something else when you talk to him.
Even that is embedded inside 
wa-ḍrib lahum
.
(O Prophet), propound to them the parable of the present life: it is like
the vegetation of the earth which flourished luxuriantly when it
mingled with the water that We sent down from the sky, but after that
the same vegetation turned into stubble which the winds blew about.
Allah alone has the power over all things.
(Al-Kahf 18: 45)
And what does Allah do at the end of this example of the two gardeners? He
says: 
mathal al-ḥayāt al-dunyā
let me give you an example of worldly life
altogether; all worldly life. The word 
al-ḥayāt
itself—‘life’—when you say life
to anybody, for example, when you say to a non-muslim, ‘How’s life, man?’
He’s not going to think life in the hereafter. When you say, ‘How’s life?’, what
they are thinking of is this life—how is your life right now? Every human being
understands when you say 
al-ḥayāt
, it means life right now. But Allah says: 
al-
ḥayāt al-dunyā
—He adds the word 
al-dunyā
, and some ulama, like Ibn ʿĀshūr,
comment: 
fīhi maʿānī al-ḥaqārah
—it actually includes the meanings of putting
something down. Allah says give them the example of the lowest form of life.
Dunyā
actually comes from 
adnā
—it’s the feminine form of 
adnā
, and the verb