The Spell of Eloquence and the Stewardship of Goodness

🔘 Weekly Commentary and Exegesis Session on al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya (Supplication 20)
📆 Date: 1403/03/31 – 13 Dhu al-Hijjah 1445
📌 Meshkat-e Noor Session
👤 Lecture by Master Ali Saei

🗒 Some of the topics discussed during the session:
📌 Please note that the hadiths cited in the text are paraphrased. For the full wording of the hadiths, please refer to the lecture.

🌼 Even if we attain the fullest faith and the soundest certainty, we must still be concerned about our faith and certainty. Even if we have been guided to righteousness, we must remain vigilant and watchful.
🌼 We must watch our thoughts, for Satan may in an instant turn a person into his pasture.
🌼 We must be careful with our words, lest they lead others astray. We should not present our beliefs in a way that leads people to accept our words blindly.
🌼 We have a duty to verify hadith against the Qur’an; all the more, then, must we scrutinise the words of ordinary people.
🌸 A critique of a poem attributed to Shaykh Bahāʾī: “By God, no one could do greater good than to open a closed door to one who has lost hope.”
🌼 No one cares for us more than God.
🌼 We must never make excuses for the mistakes of great figures.
🌼 Excusing a mistake is worse than the mistake itself.
🌼 God, the Beneficent, has commanded us to worship Him; He has not made worship solely a matter of serving people.
🌼 Those who pray and fast are also people of goodness.
🌼 In a sense, this poem enjoins what is right by forbidding another good deed.
🌸 A critique of the poem: “Drink wine, burn down the pulpit, but do not torment people.”
🌼 This poem enjoins what is right by inviting people to do wrong.
🌼 When a thought is expressed in poetic language, we must hold fast to our reason, lest the wind carry it away—for poetry is a kind of sorcery.
🌼 Sometimes the elegance of our words can keep us from seeing what lies beneath them.
🌼 Famous and renowned people must be careful, because their followers will accept their words blindly.
🌼 The sorcery of eloquence is undone by the miracle of the Qur’an.
🌼 Those who are quickly affected by sorcery and overcome by envy, the evil eye, and negative forces should know that this reveals a weakness. Anyone who is easily swept up in a mood must be on guard, since they are susceptible to the sorcery of eloquence.
🌼 Outward adornments can have the same effect.
🌼 Modern sorcery has begun in virtual spaces, where it easily enchants people’s minds.
🌼 When Moses told the sorcerers to cast down their magic, and they did, their ropes and staffs suddenly seemed to him, in his imagination, to be moving.
🌼 Virtual spaces set our minds in motion and make things seem enticing.
🌼 Nothing good takes precedence over prayer. However much good we do for others, it will be of no benefit until our prayer is accepted.
🌼 If we are not fully present in prayer, we have broken it into a thousand pieces and wronged it. Yet God completes that wounded prayer through supererogatory prayers.
🌼 The first thing a person is called to account for is prayer. If it is accepted, the rest of their deeds will also be accepted in God’s presence.
🌼 Now compare this hadith with the poem under discussion!
🌼 When we pray, we bring new life into being: prayer takes flight from our soul. (Hadith) When prayer is performed at the beginning of its appointed time, it takes flight from our soul, rises upward, and then returns to its owner. (It ascends joyfully, then returns to the person with even greater joy.) It returns bright and radiant—as if a person had fashioned a sun—and says, “You preserved me; may God preserve you.”
🌼 It is as though prayer were a divine trust within our souls, released from the cage of the heart when we pray, then taking flight toward the heavens.
🌼 Of course, presence of heart is an essential condition of prayer.
🌼 (The hadith continues:) But when prayer is performed outside its appointed time, that same prayer returns to the person, black and dark, and says, “You have ruined me; may God ruin you.”
🌼 Goodness itself must be kept in check. This trust must be given to its proper purpose; we must not bestow this divine gift upon the undeserving.
🌼 (Hadith) To do good to someone who is ungrateful for blessings is among the gravest offenses and sins.
🌼 Whoever places a good deed where it does not belong has wronged that good deed.
🌼 Goodness must not make other people’s sins worse.
🌼 If a believer does good to someone who acts wickedly, they have wronged goodness.
🌼 The kind of goodness that guides someone is a special form of goodness. If our kindness can lead someone to repent, we should offer it.
🌼 The stewardship of goodness
🌼 A good person extends their goodness to everyone, like the sun. But when someone turns goodness into wrongdoing, directing goodness toward that person is itself a wrong against goodness. If goodness becomes a means to sin, it has been wronged.
🌼 When an evildoer offers us kindness, we should keep our distance from them; there is no healing in what is forbidden.
🌼 But when a believer wrongs us, we should respond with kindness. And if we feel that our kindness might guide someone who is sinning, we should show them kindness.
🌼 We must show kindness even to animals.
🌼 The greatest share of our goodness should be for believers. If we give our wealth to a non-believer, we should be ready to give our lives for a believer.
🌼 Whoever does good to people for God’s sake will find that God blesses their time and place.
🌼 Islam rests on five pillars: prayer, zakat, fasting, pilgrimage, and wilayah.
🌼 Worship is not confined to prayer and fasting, just as it is not confined to serving people. We must Let us pass through all these gates to divine approval.
🌼 Supporting a believer means supporting the lights of faith.