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.
No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that's one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It's unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.
Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts. But let this happen in such a way that no one become aware of it; or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand to be produced immediately.
The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
A fool cannot be an actor, though an actor may act a fool's part.
I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
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