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The Healthy Heart
“It
is a heart purified from any passion that challenges Allah’s
commands and safeguarded against the worship of anything
other than Him. It seeks the judgement of no one other than
him and His Messenger. Its services are exclusively reserved
for Allah, willingly and lovingly, with total reliance,
relating all matters to Him, in fear, hope and sincere
dedication. When it loves, its love is for the sake of
Allah. If it hates, its hate is for the sake of Allah. When
it gives, it gives for Allah. If it withholds, it withholds
for Allah (SWT). The Holy Qur’an uses adjectives such as
‘healthy’, ‘wholesome’ ‘contented’ and so on to describe
this kind of heart.
Allah (SWT) has declared that on the Day of
Resurrection, only those would be saved who come with a
healthy heart:
"The day on which neither wealth nor sons
will be of any use, except for whoever brings to Allah a
sound heart. (26:88-89)"
According to an
authentic saying of the Holy Prophet (PBUH):
“Inside the human
body there is a piece of flesh which, if it is healthy, the
whole body is healthy and if it becomes unhealthy, the whole
body gets unhealthy. That is al-qalb.” (Sahih Bukhari)
The heart can not be healthy i.e. successful,
righteous, contented, pleased, assured except by the worship
of Allah, love of Him and repentance to Him as it has an
inherent need for its Lord. According to the Holy Qur’an,
the
heart will remain restless until it rests in God:
“For sure it is in
the remembrance of God that the heart finds rest,” (13:28)
The Dead Heart
The dead or sealed heart is that which is
veiled from higher inspiration for example the hearts of the
hypocrites. There is little or nothing one can do to heal
such hearts. This is the opposite of the healthy heart. It
does not know its Lord and does not worship Him. It clings
instead to its lusts and desires, even if these are likely
to incur Allah's displeasure and anger. It worships things
other than Allah, and its loves and its hatreds, its giving
and its withholding, arise from its whims, which are of
paramount importance to it.
The Sick Heart
A large number of Qur’anic verses describe
the ‘sick’ heart. The sick hearts are those that find
whatever they do, attractive to them. These hearts dislike
what turns them away from the course they are on. They are
wrapped up in fantasies, they are contemptuous, and they
follow routines and old patterns, doing ‘what their
forefathers practiced’. The sick heart is also proud and
hardened. It lacks real understanding because it is engulfed
in desire.
This is a heart with life as well as illness
in it. It has love for Allah, faith in Him, sincerity
towards Him, and reliance upon Him. These are the qualities
that give it life. It also has longing for lust and
pleasure; it prefers them and strives to experience them. It
is full of self-admiration, which can lead to its own
destruction. It listens to two callers: one calling it to
Allah and His Prophet; and the other calling it to the
momentary pleasures. It responds to whichever one of the two
happens to have most influence over it at the time.
A Hadith of the Holy Prophet explain the
process of heart getting sickness. It is as follows:
“When a believer commits a sin, a dark spot
appears on his heart. If he repents and seeks forgiveness
(of Allah), his heart becomes spotless again. But if he
persists in sin, the dark spot increases. This is the spot
that has been mentioned in the Qur’an: “But on their hearts
is the stain of (the ill) which they do.” (83:14) (Ibn Majah)
Other Ahadith mention that if the
sinner does not repent, and instead keeps on committing
sins, the stain on his heart increases and gets more
darkened until it overwhelms the whole heart. Ultimately,
the heart of sinner is sealed and he becomes spiritually
dead.”
The Healthy Heart
http://www.hssrd.org/journal/
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