When You Have Real Good Friends

When You Have Real Good Friends

You know when you have real good friends is when you sat on dinner and you talk about somebody and they give you the death glare — say, "Brother, we don't backbite on this table." Those are really good friends. You keep them very close. You pay to keep them around if you have to. Because if you're in denial, sometimes it takes a third person to remind you — habibi, no.

That's why the Prophet ﷺ said:

"A believer is a mirror of another believer."

(Sunan Abu Dawud, Hadith 4918)

When you look in the mirror, you see some chocolate smudged on your cheek, you say, "Oh no, what happened here? Oh, my tie is not in the right place." The mirror exposes your faults. If you're in denial, it just takes another person to say, habibi, no — what you did was wrong.

Muḥāsabah — Self-Accountability

That's the first way. The second one is muḥāsabah — self-accountability. Ultimately, at the core of this denial, there's a lack of fear of Allah, or a lack of a realization that these sins can devour me if I let them accumulate.

You know when you go to the doctor and the doctor says, "Look, your BMI has been increasing, you've been gathering weight." You see people say, "Look, you put on weight" — you can visibly see things are getting worse. With sins, you can't — that's a problem. You don't see that account of sins, that bank of sins. You don't see that they're increasing. You don't see that they're impacting you. But they absolutely are.

Al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī used to say:

"Indeed, I see the effects of my sins in the horse that I ride and the behavior of my wife."

It comes back on you. So you need that realization — it's important. And there's no other way other than to sit down, hold yourself to account, and have a hard, real, raw, honest conversation with yourself.