Then, after that, your hearts were hardened and became as stones or even worse in hardness. And indeed, there are stones out of which rivers gush forth, and indeed, there are of them (stones) which split asunder so that water flows from them, and indeed, there are of them (stones) which fall down for fear of Allah. And Allah is not unaware of what you do. (2:74)
There are many things that I learned from this verse of Surah Al-Baqarah but the most important is that we should not give up on hard hearted people:
When we share our knowledge and inspiration with others to bring them to the right way, we encounter two main types of people. Some of them are soft hearted or the polite ones who welcome what we tell them and so it is such a rewarding experience to talk with them about Islam and Quran and the amazing things which we are learning from it.
The second type is the hard hearted ones, who ignore us with rude expressions on their faces, or speak out against the religion. And we think they don’t have hearts but stones. Why aren’t they shaken with the awareness of Allah. It hurts and confuses us and for some of us whose own faith is weak, it’s even worse to start looking at things from their point of view. And so we start avoiding them and talk only to the like-minded people.
But Allah is telling us here not to give up on these “hard” people. With patience and consistent good behaviour we should keep inviting them to the right way and inshaAllah Allah will open their hearts Just like stones can crack open and rivers gush out from it. Our job is not to criticize such people but to genuinely feel hopeful about them and help them to bring out their goodness.
The best example is that of Hazrat Umar (r.a) who took 5 years to accept the truth but when he did so, it was like the best thing that happened to the Muslims, and to this day we admire him for all the goodness that gushed out of him. But remember that a woman like us had the patience to talk to him even when she had just then got a severe blow on the face from him and blood was coming out of the wound, still she talked to him……..imagine ourselves in such a situation….would we even look at a person who had hit us even if it was our own brother. We are ready to cut off all our relations just if someone talks rudely to us. Our ego is more important to us than our religion. We have to think fairly and recognize our mistakes. Only then we can feel the true love of Allah in our hearts and then we will be ready to sacrifice our ego for His sake.
May Allah give us the true guidance and protect us from all sharr whether it’s outside or inside our own Nafs.
The Seekers Path 