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.
Pay attention to the hungry, both in this country and around the world. Pay attention to the poor. Pay attention to our responsibilities for world peace. We are our brother's keeper.
Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.
War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.
It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.
To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.
The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."
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