How is your life a loan from Allah?

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf explains in this video the meaning of the word deen.

What does deen mean?

The Arabic word comes from a root word dana which means to discipline.

It has the meaning to consider guilty, (idana) is when somebody is guilty of something.

It also has the idea of debt, indebtedness.

(Dain) is debt, (madeen) is somebody who is in debt.

Da’en is the one whom you owe debt to.

It also has the meaning of gentle rain that keeps coming back.

At the essence of religion is an idea that it is a life giving rain to the spirit that keeps coming back.

It is something that keeps coming back and is reintroduced to humanity again and again.

The essence of the human experience has been these rains that have come, revelations have come.

Heavenly rains that nurture hearts, that bring brings their lives to a spiritual fruition.

The idea also of debt which is also interesting because there is an idea that if somebody loans you money, you feel indebted to them.

The idea here is that God has loaned you your life.

It’s a loan, and the beauty of a loan is that it is not yours, but while you have it you can do with it what you want.

Now obviously if someone loans you money with a stipulation, if you go to the bank and you tell them “I want a 100,000 dollars to buy a house,” and then you go and score a kilo of cocaine with the money…

Obviously you have broken the contract.

They would not just give it to you like that.

They do not do it like that anymore. But generally the idea of taking a loan as a trust.

There is a reason why that person has given you a loan, generally people want to know what the loan is for.

They ask you “what do you needed for?”

The more honorable the reason, the more likely for the loan.

So the idea of God giving you a loan, a goodly loan, it’s the loan of your life and then the beauty of it is on one hand it is a loan, and on the other hand He offers the chance to sell this thing that He is giving back to Him.

That is an honor according to the Qur’an, “Allah bought from the believers…” (Qur’an, 9:111)

So the idea of God buying from you something is meaning that He is putting you, there is parity in the relationship.

It is not that you are an equal to God, but in this relationship He is making you an equal.

He is making you someone that has gone into a transaction with Him and the sale is your soul and that is a high thing.

So the idea of giving the soul back to God and He pays you for it and that is why when that verse was revealed everybody was happy except Abu Bakr.

He began to week and the Prophet, peace be upon him, looked at him and said “why are you weeping?”

He said “How can we sell back to God what already belongs to God?”

So he understood it at a deeper level than everybody else, and that is why he is Abu Bakr.

He understood that it is an honor from God, that is all it is, and so this idea of this debt, that you are morally obliged to pay this debt back and that is what deen is.

It’s the payback. It’s what you do as a way of paying back this immense loan of consciousness, of a heart, that He gave you human consciousness and that is how you pay it back.

Don’t miss this excellent 4 minutes reminder on how your life in a loan from Allah, by Sheikh Hamza Yusuf.