"You Are Nobility" — Understanding the Nafs (Greater Jihad: Episode 2)

As we've talked about before, the the removal of falsehood is the prerequisite. This follows the the the the logic of the Shahada itself. The negation followed by the affirmation. Negate the falsehood, affirm the truth. So when we're talking about morals, when we're talking about a coherent moral framework and a and a coherent moral code of conduct, well, first, you have to negate the validity of other than that.

Because, again, people in the West, especially in the West, and especially among westernized people, not exclusively among them, but especially among them, there is this idea of morals being very individualized, being more or less ad hoc, being very vague, very feelings based and so forth, very customizable, follow your heart and so forth. And this is often within the context of what the West touts as the highest priority, the highest principle, or even you can say the highest moral value, which is freedom. This is this is what they say. Freedom and individuality above all else. Right?

Now remember, this is just the narrative. This is just the narrative, not the reality. Not at all. It's not the reality at all in the West. They don't believe in freedom and individuality at all, in almost any area of life in reality.

But they believe in it. They do believe in it in terms of morals. No one is supposed to impose. No one is supposed to judge. No one is supposed to be too strict about anything morally.

And it's not just, you know, don't impose your morals on others. It's not just don't impose your morals on others. It's also you're not supposed to even visibly be taking morals too seriously your own self. Because then that means you're repressed, you're rigid or what have you. It means you're you're judgmental, you're narrow minded.

You should be more open. Right? You should understand that relativism is the intelligent approach. That's the enlightened human being. Morality is just a construct and what have you.

Right? Nothing is absolutely right. Nothing is absolutely wrong. This belief in the West or this lack of belief in the West is completely intertwined with their hyper prioritization of freedom and individuality in their narrative. Because freedom is essential to happiness.

Right? Individual individuality is essential to happiness, supposedly. And then post enlightenment, so called enlightenment, you basically turn morality into legal and governmental policies, legal and governmental frameworks, like freedom of expression, you know, freedom of this, freedom of that, and the consent issue. Consent is the main issue determining morality in the West. Consenting adults, consent of the governed, and so forth.

Right? Consent is the main issue. The idea that no one should be harmed by your actions against their will. Right? So you moved morality into the arena of rights and social contracts and individual autonomy.

Okay? Now, first of all, that move happened within a context, within the European context of centuries of tyranny and a very deeply ingrained tendency to be tyrannical. So you establish this individualism and this freedom idea and the idea that, that morality should be basically subordinate to the preservation of the freedom of autonomous individuals. You establish that. And this amounts to a social endorsement or societal endorsement of moral relativism.

And that now the role of the authorities, role of the government is basically just to ensure the upholding of that relativism by way of upholding the rights of individuals to do whatever they want consensually. So then this deepened and reinforced, in the culture this idea. The idea that right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral are all subjective. So you understand that your system from the beginning, your system from the beginning, was not just secular, it was amoral. And then this diminished the importance of morality overall to your culture and to your society and to your nation.

Now the result of all of that is supposed to be that you're happier. That you're happier like that. That you're more contented like that. That your individual dignity is preserved by that. That's supposed to be the result.

You know? That's supposed to be the reality of your life right now. Happy, contented, and dignified. Because that's what that approach promised you. That's what they promised with that approach.

So where is that? Was that promise fulfilled? You commit suicide and self harm more than anyone else, more than any other nation in the world. You're more depressed than anyone else as a society. You have more anxiety.

You have more addiction. You have more, drug overdoses, more emotional and psychological disorders than anyone else, you're lonelier than anyone else. Right? Your families dissolve more than anyone else's families. It seems like you're barely coping under the burden of all this happiness and all this contentment and all this freedom.

I don't have to tell you this. I you don't need me to tell you this. You know this because you're living this. You're living the failed promise of that approach to morality. But then it almost becomes like the the the sunken cost fallacy because you have believed in and you have been invested in, for so long, those Western frameworks.

Those frameworks that said that nothing is more important than freedom, nothing is more important than individual autonomy, you know, to each his own, no judgment and so forth. You've been so invested in that and you have been told all your lives that this is the most important thing, that this is right, and that this is in fact itself moral, the most moral thing. Now you've spent so much time in this state of dissonance that now you resist turning away from it. You resist accepting the truth that no, there is objective morality. And that being misaligned or or or being out of alignment or being disconnected from objective morality or living contrary to it causes most, if not all, of the misery that you are suffering in your society, suffering in your home, and suffering in your own heart.

You were raised to believe that following the rules means that you're being subjugated. You were raised in this revolutionary defiant, mentality. So you think that if you're following, any sort of rules that it means that you're subjugated, it means that you're weak, it means that you're being controlled, It means that you're not free. It means that you're oppressed. You're repressed.

You're suppressed. It means that you're not, you know, living your best life or what have you. They used to say it means that you're a square. It means that you're beta. You know, you're a simp or whatever.

In principle, not just with regards to following a specific rule, but in principle. The idea that following rules itself means that you're weak, means that you're timid, means that you're scared of doing what you want, you're meek and submissive and so forth. And again, this impression comes out of the European experience. The European experience where rules have never been imposed for your benefit. They've only ever been imposed to control you and to subordinate you and to oppress you.

That's the only reason rules were ever imposed in Europe and in the West. And that's why you have this idea that's why you have this idea that religion is just a tool of control. It's just an instrument of control. Because that's your experience. Because that's how you used your religion.

But I think I've talked about that a few times before, so I don't need to go into all that now. The point is, your culture, western culture, completely marginalized objective morality, exiled objective morality, and they sold you an impostor of morality which was identical to amorality because that's what moral relativism is. Moral relativism is just a fancy way to say amoral. And they told you that this completely deceptive version of morality, they told you that that was the only moral thing that you must uphold at all costs. Never mind the fact that upholding this moral relativism, this amorality has made you emotionally and psychologically ill.

It's made you depressed. It's made you anxious. It's made you alcoholic. It's made you addicted. It's made you dependent on medications.

It's made you lonely, and it's made you suicidal. Never mind all that. That's the state that you're in. That's the state that they put you in. And the truly sick irony is that this is in fact the most diabolical thing that you can do both to freedom and to individuality.

It's a profound violation of the sanctity of the individual that you always talk about. When they teach you that morality is relative, then character is relative, then you are relative. You understand? And relative means unimportant. Relative means possessing no inherent value, means disposable.

Who you are as an individual, who you are as a human being is not important. And that's called in the West upholding the sanctity of the individual, not violating it. But what kind of a person you are doesn't matter. And when they tell you that morally, you are all blank slates and you can just fill up that slate with whatever you like because they don't care, nobody cares what is on your moral slate. It doesn't matter.

They just care about what's in your bank account, not what's on your moral slate. Your whole culture, your whole society, you you you live in an environment where morality is not valued, it's not rewarded, it's not respected, it's not even treated as if it has any objective worth or any objective value in and of itself. You're told that you are born morally empty. And no matter what you fill that emptiness with, they're telling you it's relative. Meaning it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what you fill that moral emptiness with. You can fill it with honesty or with dishonesty. You can put in there, self restraint or self indulgence. You can put chastity or you can put promiscuity. Society doesn't care.

But I have to tell you the truth that you are in fact a moral being at birth. You have what we understand in Islam as your fitra. Your fitra. This is your your natural orientation as a human being. As a son or a daughter of Nabi Adam the prophet Adam.

You have an innate nature. That's the fitra. And it's a moral nature. It's a pure nature. It's a good nature.

It's a noble nature. It's an honorable nature. Do you understand? I'm telling you that you are good. You are good.

You are honest. You are decent. You are chaste. You are faithful. You are righteous.

You have a natural aversion to filth. You have a natural aversion to cruelty, to greed, to selfishness, to debauchery, to obscenity. You're naturally offended in your nature. You're naturally repulsed by wickedness, by lying, by backbiting, by hatefulness, by aggression. You have a natural aversion to spite and to envy and to lust and to avarice and so forth.

It's beneath you. You understand you were created with a regal nature, a noble nature. That's what you were created with. You and I are not the descendants of apes and monkeys. No.

You and I are the descendants of the prophet of God. The first human being created by the two hands of Allah himself. You and I are the of the earth. Every one of us. Every single one of us.

And if you don't know what that means, if you don't know what Khalifa means, it means the custodians. We're the custodians. We're the caretakers. We're the curators. We're the guardians.

We're the protectors. We're the stewards. We're the trustees of this earth. Generation after generation, your life on this earth, your life is your tenure of duty. It's your term in office.

This is the sanctity of the individual. That is the sacredness of every individual human being on this planet. But you don't understand who you are. You don't understand what you are. You're nobility.

That's what you are. You're nobility. That's what you are, but that's not what you have become. That's what Allah made you, but that's not what your society has turned you into, and that's not what you allowed yourself to turn yourself into. And that's why your life is a mess.

That's why your heart is constantly unsettled. And that's why you lay awake at night, and why you can barely make yourself get up in the morning. That's why everything seems dull and pointless. Everything seems futile. That's why you feel like life itself is a bad joke.

And that's why you look for any way to escape. You look for any way to escape, whether it's through mindless time wasting entertainment, whether it's through drinking, whether it's through drugs, through numbing yourself with medications, or through literally ending your own life. And it's no good telling you that scrolling your phone, is a waste of time or binge watching shows or surfing the Internet. It's no good telling you that that's time wasting because that's exactly what you're trying to do. That's exactly why you do it.

You're trying to waste time. You're trying to run down the clock on your own life because you're living the wrong life. This is not the life that you were born to live, and this is not who you were born to be. Your society makes you think that you're successful. You're a successful person.

The definition of success in your society, the definition of your of success in your society is to be rich and famous, not to be moral. You understand? Okay. Less than 0.001% of all human beings on the earth are ever gonna be rich and famous. So they gave you an unobtainable definition of success.

They can almost only even that definition of success can almost only ever be obtained through immoral ways, corrupting yourself and by compromising yourself and so forth. And then they dismiss the definition of success that you actually can obtain and that you can actually be, which is to be a moral person, which is to be what you were made to be. Oh, you've been deceived. You know, prophet Muhammad peace be upon him told us that the one who is not aligned with their fitra, it's like they've been mutilated. You know, you were born upon your natural, regal, noble orientation.

Pristine. You were born pristine, but you've been mutilated. So now all of your natural inclinations and your natural aversions have all gotten twisted up. Right? It's like when you when you, tangle your arms, your hands, you tangle your fingers altogether, and then you try to point in this direction or that direction or you try to move your index finger and you end up moving your your ring finger or your thumb or something like that.

You point left when your brain is telling you to point right because you're all mixed up in every which way. It's all tangled. You're discombobulated. And it's not just it's not so much that your judgment is impaired. It's that you're so, contorted, you're so mutilated and so malfunctioning.

So you say yes to things that you should say no to because you're discombobulated, and you say no to things that you should say yes to. And you do what you shouldn't, and you don't do what you should. And you keep making yourself more miserable the more you try to make yourself happy. This is what you're going through because you're disoriented. It's because you're disoriented.

You know? You poke yourself in the eye when the instruction is to scratch your nose, but your society keeps telling you that eyes and noses are all it's all relative. They keep telling you it's relative. They've got you thinking that left and right are relative, that north, south, east, and west are relative, that forwards and backwards are relative, and you wonder why you can't get anywhere. So you have to understand your nefs.

There isn't really there isn't really an English word that can properly convey what is meant by the nefs. Roughly speaking, it's like it's yourself. It's your your sense of self, your consciousness, your ego, your psyche. Right? All of these concepts all of these concepts are combined in the meaning of the nefs.

So when we talk about jihad and nefs, we're talking about the struggle to control your nefs, to control yourself, to refine it and to align it with your fitra. Yes. We've been dealing with, what you call psychology or psychotherapy for millennium before Freud, before Jung, or before any of those other people came along. And all they did was misunderstand the dynamics. They should have become Muslim.

They should have just become Muslim. If they really wanted to understand, if they truly wanted to understand any of these things, they would have just become Muslim instead of just trying to figure it all out on their own. Okay? Your nefs operates on three registers. You have the commanding and coercive nefs, you have the self reproaching nefs, and then you have the tranquil nefs.

And this all develops over time and experience. It increases in complexity from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. The Quran addresses the human being as nefs from the outstart. So it's not something that's, you know, added after puberty or added only after intellectual maturity. What develops is not the nefs itself, but its complexity, the complexity of the nefs.

Like a newborn has an appetite, it has hunger, it has attachment, it has instinct. There's no moral corruption. That's just raw capacity of a human, infant. There's no arrogance yet. There's no self justification.

No narrative engineering. No, real ego. And then as the mind becomes more sophisticated, then it becomes capable of a lot more things. It becomes capable of, for example, lying. It becomes capable of self deception.

You know? The neps isn't, like, located in the brain. It's not like a gland. It's not a physical organ. Understand?

It's the self. Inclining, desiring, asserting, and so forth. All of these aspects of your psyche, of yourself is not reducible to the mind. The mind is an instrument and the neps wants to use it. And higher intelligence raises the stakes, you know.

A child grabs a toy, that's instinct. But a grown adult manipulates ideology to protect his status or to justify exploitation, or self indulgence or to preserve his ego or what have you. That's a mature nefs with tools with tools. But cognitive complexity doesn't automatically strengthen the worst characteristics of the nefs. It increases the potential range of what's possible, And it also increases your capacity for discipline.

Your your capacity to align your nefs with your fitra. So the real issue isn't like brain development or something. It's training. The real issue is training. If you indulge repeatedly in your desires, then your neps becomes more commanding and more coercive.

If you ignore your own guilt and your own remorse for what you have done, then it becomes more dominating. But if you discipline it and you subordinate it to truth, you align it with your fitra, then it will become tranquil. So you've been taught, like I said, you've been taught to treat all rules like they're inherently oppressive. Like all rules are inherently restrictive and anti freedom and so forth. But there are rules for how to do things.

You understand? A map is a rule book. A blueprint is a rule book. A recipe is a rule book. You know?

Chemistry, computer programming, accounting, mathematics, what have you. How to go from a to b. This is not relative. This is not relative. Do you understand me?

Architecture, it's not relative. Plumbing, electrical engineering, nutrition, muscle muscle building, you name it. It's not relative. There are rules. There are rules for how to get things done, how to make things happen.

You know, agriculture, horticulture, have you, photosynthesis. You can't feed a plant motor oil instead of water. You can't grow a plant in the freezer. You can't plant wheat in a swamp. Now relativism is not enlightened.

It's chaos. It's counterproductive. It ensures that you will never get results. So if you manage your if you if you try to, manage your nefs with moral relativism, this is like approaching your body with nutritional relativism. Well, that's a disaster.

And you see what I mean? You see what I mean about what you are, who you are by nature, what you were made to be by nature, the upright, moral, righteous, decent, dignified, regal person that you were made to be, that it is your right to be the custodian, the caretaker, the trustee of the earth. Well, moral relativism sabotages that. It undermines that. It cripples that.

It subjugates that. And now you've been taken hostage. You've been taken hostage, and you call it freedom. You're a hostage, and you call yourself free, but you have no sovereignty over your own self. You're a hostage to your desires.

You're a hostage to your urges. A hostage to your vanity, to your ego, to your greed, to your appetite, to your self indulgence. You're controlled. You're dominated. You're oppressed.

You're humiliated. You're degraded. And you treat yourself with no respect. You treat yourself with no honor, with no dignity, with no nobility. It's unnatural.

And then you wonder why you're miserable? Because you left your neps derelict instead of refining it, instead of training it, instead of disciplining it, and molding it, and controlling it. You have subjugated yourself as an individual in the name of individualism. You've deprived yourself of your rights in the name of upholding your rights. You have enslaved yourself in the name of freedom.

So now instead of being a regal, refined, responsible, sovereign Khalifa upon the earth, you're just a a cluster of impulses to be manipulated. You're a puppet to your own desires, betraying your own potential and your own innate purpose. Well, this approach is never gonna deliver you happiness. This approach is never gonna deliver you contentment. It's never gonna deliver you freedom, and it's never gonna deliver you liberty.

It won't even preserve your rights as an individual. It can and only ever has delivered you into captivity. Do you understand me? So, yes, the first thing that you need to understand is that the whole framework and all the paradigms around morality and around, moral behavior in the West, all of that is illegitimate and deceptive. They devalue you as a human being.

They deprive you as a human being, and they degrade you as a human being. You've been taught the complete opposite, the complete opposite of what's true regarding morality. You were taught that morality means, like I say, repressive rules that restrict you, that, I don't know, stifle you or hold you back instead of hold you up. You were taught that adhering to a moral code makes you rigid, makes you narrow minded, makes you impractical, or makes you docile, makes you afraid of experience, makes you afraid of progress and so forth. It makes you, I don't know, judgmental, makes you harsh, makes you close, or whatever the case may be.

They have so many ways. They have so many ways to stigmatize morality. It'll make your head spin. And it makes it very obvious, SubhanAllah. It makes it very obvious that the last thing that they ever want you to be is a moral person.

The closest that the the the the closest that they will ever come to approving morality is if that morality is completely vague and vapid. That's open to all sorts of interpretations. Only a morality that blurs lines but doesn't have any red lines. They'll only allow a morality that is so malleable that it is completely indistinguishable from a morality. And I can talk I've talked before about how far this how far back this goes with the West.

It goes back very far. And I can talk about how all of this has developed over time. I've talked about it before, but the point is you have been lied to about morality and about how paramount it is in its importance to human beings, to individuals, to relationships, to families, to communities, and to nations. You know, the West talks about the, scientific method, which you learned from us. You learned that from the Muslims.

But you did not learn the moral method, the science of the nafs, the science of the fitra, the science of human nature. And this is why your whole society is off kilter.