chosen to see it? Shouldn’t we ask ourselves what we were intended to learn, change, transform?
Because if we think for a moment this is all just about the people of Egypt, then we have desperately
missed the point. We were asleep, and Allah chose to wake us.
We were dead and Allah wants to give us life.
We were conditioned to believe that our enemy was outside of ourselves. That he had power over us.
This is also an illusion. The enemy is inside of us. All external enemies are only manifestations of our
own diseases. And so if we want to conquer those enemies, we must first conquer the enemy inside
ourselves. This is why the Qur’an tells us:
“Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they first change what is in themselves.”
(Qur’an, 13:11)
We must first conquer greed, selfishness, shirk, ultimate fear, love, hope and dependence on anything
other than Allah. We must conquer hubbad-dunya (love of dunya)—the root of all our diseases, and
all our oppression. Before we can defeat the Pharaohs in our lives, we must defeat the Pharaoh inside
ourselves. So the fight in Egypt is a fight for liberation. Yes. But liberation from what? Who is truly
oppressed? Are you and I free? What is true oppression? Ibn Taymiyyah (ra) answers this question
when he says: “The one who is (truly) imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned from Allah
and the captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved him.” (Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Wabil)
When you are free inside, you will never allow anyone to take away your freedom. And when you
have inner freedom, you can look through tyrants and thugs to the Lord of the tyrants and thugs. When
you are free inside, you become unenslaveable, because you can only enslave a person with
attachments. You can only threaten a person who is afraid of loss. You only have power over
someone when they need or want something that you have the ability to take away. But there is only
one thing which no person has the power to take away from you: God.
And so when we fight to free Egypt, on a grander and realer scale it is a fight to also free ourselves. It
is a fight to free ourselves of the tyranny of our own nafs and desires. A fight to free ourselves from
our own false attachments and dependencies, from all that controls us, from all that we worship—
other than Him. It is a fight to free us from our own slavery. Whether we are slaves to the American
dollar, to our own desires, to status, to wealth, or to fear—the purification of Egypt is a purification
of us all.
That is why the formula for true success given to us in the Qur’an consists of two elements: Sabr
(patience, perseverance) and Taqwa (fear of God alone):
“O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed and fear God (alone) that you