Reclaim Your Heart Quotes

“If there is one recipe for unhappiness it is that: expectations.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“My value as a woman is not measured by the size of my waist or the number of men who like me. My worth as a human being is measured on a higher scale: a scale of righteousness and piety. And my purpose in life-despite what fashion magazines say-is something more sublime than just looking good for men.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“Real love brings about calm—not inner torment. True love allows you to be at peace with yourself and with God. That is why Allah says: “that you may dwell in tranquility.” Hawa is the opposite. Hawa will make you miserable. And just like a drug, you will crave it always, but never be satisfied. You will chase it to your own detriment, but never reach it.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“This world cannot break you—unless you give it permission. And it cannot own you unless you hand it the keys—unless you give it your heart. And so, if you have handed those keys to dunya for a while—take them back. This isn’t the End. You don’t have to die here. Reclaim your heart and place it with its rightful owner:
God.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“So often we experience things in life, and yet never see the connections between them. When we are given hardship, or feel pain, we often fail to consider that the experience may be the direct cause or result of another action or experience. Sometimes we fail to recognize the direct connection between the pain in our lives and our relationship with Allah SWT”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“Time of difficulty test our faith, our fortitude and our strenght. During these times, the level of our imaan becomes manifest”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“Keep going. You're almost there and remember, the sun is most beautiful as it's going away.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“Know that transformation sometimes begins with a fall. So never curse the fall.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“We must also realize that nothing happens without a purpose. Nothing. Not even broken hearts. Not even pain. That broken heart and that pain are lessons and signs for us. They are warnings that something is wrong. They are warnings that we need to make a change. Just like the pain of being burned is what warns us to remove our hand from the fire, emotional pain warns us that we need to make an internal change. We need to detach. Pain is a form of forced detachment. Like the loved one who hurts you again and again and again, the more dunya hurts us, the more we inevitably detach from it. The more we inevitably stop loving it.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“As Muslim women, we have been liberated from this silent bondage. We don't need society's standard of beauty or fashion, to define our worth. We don't need to become just like men to be honored, and we don't need to wait for a prince to save or complete us. Our worth, our honor, our salvation, and our completion lie not in the slave. But, in the Lord of the slave.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“If you seek Him, God can raise you up, and replace the darkness of the ocean, with the light of His Sun.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“If you allow dunya to own your heart, like the ocean that owns the boat, it will take over. You will sink down to the depths of the sea. You will touch the ocean floor.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“To empty the heart does not mean to not love. On the contrary, true love, as God intented it, is purest when it is not based on a false attachment. The process of first emptying the heart can be found in the beginning half of the shahada (declaration of faith).”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“However the problem wasn't with the vase, or even that the vases kept breaking. The problem was that I kept putting them on the edges of tables.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“[A Letter to the Culture that Raised Me] I'm not here to be on display. And my body is not for public consumption. I will not be reduced to an object, or a pair of legs to sell shoes. I'm a soul, a mind, a servant of God. My worth is defined by the beauty of my soul, my heart, my moral character. So I won't worship your beauty standards, and I don't submit to your fashion sense. My submission is to something higher.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“Nothing is difficult if you seek it through your Lord, and nothing is easy if you seek it through yourself.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“When we miss a plane, lose a job, or find ourselves unable to marry the person we want, have we ever stopped to consider the possibility that it may have been for our own good? Allah tells us in the Qur’an: “…But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah Knows, while you know not.” (Qur’an, 2:216)”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“Allah gives us gifts, but then we come to love them as we should only love Him. We take those gifts and inject them into our hearts, until they take over. Soon we cannot live without them. Every waking moment is spent in contemplation of them, in submission and worship to them. The mind and the heart that was created by Allah, for Allah, becomes the property of someone or something else. And then the fear comes. The fear of loss begins to cripple us. The gift—that should have remained in our hands—takes over our heart, so the fear of losing it consumes us. Soon, what was once a gift becomes a weapon of torture and a prison of our own making. How can we be freed of this? At times, in His infinite mercy, Allah frees us…by taking it away.
As a result of it being taken, we turn to Allah wholeheartedly. In that desperation and need, we ask, we beg, we pray. Through the loss, we reach a level of sincerity and humility and dependence on Him which we would otherwise not reach—had it not been taken from us. Through the loss, our hearts turn entirely to face Him.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“Like the sun that sets at the end of the day, so too will Ramadan come and go, leaving only it's mark on our heart's sky.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“The people are only tools, a means used by God. But they are not the sourse of help, aid, or salvation of any kind. Only God is. The people cannot even create the wing of a fly (Quran, 22:73).”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“And it is in that which you love most that you find the greatest test.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“In his mercy, He sent the storm itself to make us seek help. And then knowing that we’re likely to get the wrong answer, He gives us a multiple choice exam with only one option to choose from: the correct answer. The hardship itself is ease. By taking away all other hand-holds, all other multiple choice options, He has made the test simple.
It’s never easy to stand when the storm hits. And that’s exactly the point. By sending the wind, He brings us to our knees: the perfect position to pray”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“It’s never easy to stand when the storm hits. And that’s exactly the point. By sending the wind, He brings us to our knees: the perfect position to pray.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“Subhan’Allah. It is in the process of ‘losing’ that we are given.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“With my veil I put my faith on display—rather than my beauty. My value as a human is defined by my relationship with God, not by my looks. I cover the irrelevant. And when you look at me, you don’t see a body. You view me only for what I am: a servant of my Creator.
You see, as a Muslim woman, I’ve been liberated from a silent kind of bondage. I don’t answer to the slaves of God on earth. I answer to their King.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“O Lord, make my soul a sanctuary, a fortress within. That no one and nothing can disturb. A place of calm, silence, and serenity, untouched by the outside world.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“The enduring life is the one that begins once we awaken from this world. And it is in that awakening that we realize… It was only a dream”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles

“the nature of the dunya as a place of fleeting moments and temporary attachments.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“We are told in the Quran: “…whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks. And God hears and knows all things.” (Qur’an, 2: 256) There is a crucial lesson in this verse: that there is only one hand-hold that never breaks. There is only one place where we can lay our dependencies. There is only one relationship that should define our self-worth and only one source from which to seek our ultimate happiness, fulfillment, and security. That place is God.”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart

“Allah gives us gifts, but then we often become dependent on those gifts, instead of Him. when He gives us money, we depend on the money - not Him. when He gives us people, we depend on people - not Him. when He gives us status or power, we depend on, and become distracted by these things. when Allah gives us health, we become deceived. e think we will never die".”
― Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles