And that is the secret of this world. If you remove love of dunya from your heart, the dunya is yours for the taking. You can have the dunya because it's in your hand and not in your heart
Interpretation
The quote suggests that detaching oneself from worldly desires enables a person to truly possess and enjoy the world.
Hamza Yusuf's quote reflects the philosophical idea that attachment to material desires (dunya) can be a hindrance to true happiness and fulfillment. By prioritizing love for higher values over worldly possessions, one can achieve a state of peace and control, allowing them to experience the world without being dominated by it.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding peace in life choices.
People say to you, 'you've changed', or something like that, well, I hope, for the sake of God, that you have changed, because I don't want to be the same person all my life. I want to be growing, I want to be expanding. I want to be changing. Because animate things change, inanimate things don&'t change. Dead things don't change. And the heart should be alive, it should be changing, it should be moving, it should be growing, its knowledge should be expanding.
Hypocrisy is wretched because the hypocrite says with his tongue what is not in his heart. He wrongs his tongue and oppresses his heart. But if the heart is sound, the condition of the tongue follows suit. We are commanded to be upright in speech, which is a gauge of the heart's state.
Islam is based on naql (texts) and ‘aql (intellect). Some people just have the texts – we call them naql-heads.
The weak are dominated by their ego, the wise dominate their ego, and the intelligent are in a constant struggle against their ego.
Opinion is not knowledge. You're entitled to your own opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts.
Why do we need to justify God's existence? He exists. We need to justify our own existence.
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
When you live completely in each moment, without expecting anything, you have no idea of time.
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.
Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
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