Nawawi Hadith 41: Desire and Revelation

Part One: When Desire Meets Revelation

Brothers,

Today’s khutbah is based on the 41st hadith in Imam Nawawi’s 40 Hadith:

On the authority of Abu Muhammad Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As (may Allah be pleased with both of them), who said: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, 'None of you [truly] believes until his inclination is in accordance with what I have brought.' (Sharh al-Sunnah (hasan))

Abdullah ibn Amr was one of the most careful companions when it came to preserving the Prophet’s ﷺ words. He was given permission to write down hadith when other companions relied only on memory, and his collection, called al-Sahifah al-Sadiqah, was treasured by later scholars. This hadith comes down to us with a good chain, recorded in Sharh al-Sunnah, and Imam Nawawi included it among the forty because it names the deepest struggle a believer will ever face: the struggle between what he wants and what he has been given.

Let us sit with this hadith carefully.

Part 1: What “None of You Believes” Really Means

The Prophet ﷺ did not say “none of you is a Muslim.” He said none of you truly believes, meaning complete, perfected faith is absent, until this condition is met. This is the same style of language used in other hadith: “none of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself,” and “none of you truly believes until I am more beloved to him than his father, his child, and all of mankind.”

In each case, the base of Islam is not being denied. What is being described is the ceiling of iman, the level a believer is called to climb toward. A person can pray, fast, and avoid the major sins, and still have a heart that resists this particular surrender: making his own inclination, his hawa, submit to what the Messenger ﷺ brought.

But no! By your Lord, they will never be true believers until they accept you ˹O Prophet˺ as the judge in their disputes, and find no resistance in their hearts against your decision, and submit wholeheartedly. (An-Nisaa, 4:65)

Notice the same structure as our hadith: not merely accepting the ruling outwardly, but finding no harajah, no discomfort or resistance, within the heart. That inward ease with the ruling of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, even when it cuts against what we wanted, is the very thing this hadith is describing.

Part 2: What Hawa Is, and Why It Competes With Wahy

Hawa is the pull of the lower self toward what it wants, regardless of whether Allah has permitted it. It is not simply “desire” in a neutral sense, wanting food when hungry or rest when tired. It is the tendency to make our wants the standard by which we judge truth, instead of making truth the standard by which we judge our wants.

Have you seen the one who has taken their desires as their god, whom Allah has left to stray knowingly, sealing their hearing and hearts and placing a cover on their sight? Who then can guide them after Allah ˹has willed otherwise˺? Will you not then be mindful? (Al-Jaathiya, 45:23)

This is a severe verse. Allah describes a man who has made his desire an ilah, a god, meaning he obeys it the way he should obey Allah. He does not ask “is this pleasing to Allah?” He asks “is this pleasing to me?” And whatever answers yes becomes his religion, whatever answers no becomes his enemy, regardless of what revelation says.

Wahy, revelation, is the opposite pull. It says: here is what Allah wants from you, not what you want from yourself. The Quran and Sunnah are not suggestions to be measured against our preference. They are the standard our preference must be measured against.

None of you truly believes until his desire is in accordance with what I have brought. (Ibn Majah)

This is a variant wording of the same hadith, and it drives home the same point from a different angle: the test is not whether you can quote the ruling correctly. The test is whether your heart has actually come to want what the ruling wants.

Part 3: The People Who Failed This Test

The Quran gives us a gallery of people who knew the truth but let their hawa override it.

Whenever a messenger came to you ˹Israelites˺ with what your souls did not desire, you grew arrogant. Some ˹prophets˺ you rejected and others you killed. (Al-Baqara, 2:87)

Notice the phrase: what your souls did not desire. The problem was never a lack of clarity. The messengers came with clear signs. The problem was that the message clashed with what the people wanted, and instead of adjusting their wants, they rejected the message, and in the worst cases, they killed the messenger.

Had We willed, We could have elevated them with these signs, but they clung to the earth and followed their desires. So their example is that of a dog: if you chase it away, it pants, and if you leave it, it ˹still˺ pants. This is the example of the people who reject Our signs. So narrate to them these stories, so perhaps they will reflect. (Al-A'raaf, 7:176)

This is one of the harshest similes in the Quran, and it is reserved specifically for a man who was given knowledge, given signs, and still chose to “cling to the earth” and follow desire instead of guidance. Knowledge without submission does not save a person. It condemns him more severely, because he cannot claim ignorance.

The heart's ruin comes from following desire and long hope. Following desire blinds one from the truth, and long hope makes one forget the Hereafter. (Ibn al-Qayyim, Madarij al-Salikin)

Part Two: Submitting the Self in Daily Life

Brothers,

Part 4: Where This Battle Shows Up Today

This is not a hadith about people long ago. It is a hadith about every single day of our lives.

It shows up when the athan calls and your body wants to keep sleeping, and you have to choose between the warmth of the bed and the command of Allah.

It shows up when someone wrongs you and your nafs wants revenge, humiliation, payback, while the Sunnah calls you to restrain your anger, to forgive, or at most to respond with equal measure and no more.

It shows up when halal and haram are both in front of you, and the haram is more pleasurable, more available, or more socially accepted, and you have to decide whose verdict counts: yours, or the One who created you.

But whoever is in awe of standing before their Lord and restrains themselves from ˹evil˺ desires, Paradise will certainly be ˹their˺ home. (An-Naazi'aat, 79:40-41)

This verse ties directly into our hadith. Paradise is not promised to the man who never feels desire. Every human being feels desire. Paradise is promised to the man who feels it, and restrains it, out of awe of standing before his Lord. The restraint itself is the worship.

Part 5: This Struggle Behind These Walls

Brothers, nowhere is this hadith tested more sharply than in a place like this one.

You are confined. Much of what your nafs wants, freedom, comfort, control over your own schedule, contact with your family whenever you wish, has been taken from you. That absence creates pressure, and pressure has a way of turning into resentment, and resentment has a way of turning into exactly the condition this hadith warns against: a heart that resists submission because it is exhausted from resisting everything else.

But consider this from another angle. You have fewer distractions here than almost anywhere else to hide from this question. Out there, a man can drown the struggle between desire and revelation in noise, work, entertainment, company. In here, the question sits with you. When you are angry at another brother and your nafs wants to fight, when you are frustrated with a rule and your nafs wants to rebel, when you are tempted toward something forbidden that is somehow still available even in confinement, the choice is stark and undeniable: what I want, or what Allah and His Messenger ﷺ have brought.

Every time you choose the second over the first in here, you are training the very quality this hadith describes. You are teaching your inclination to bend toward revelation instead of demanding revelation bend toward it. Few environments offer this training as intensely as this one does.

The strong man is not the one who overcomes people by his strength, but the one who controls himself while in anger. (Bukhari & Muslim)

Part 6: How to Train the Heart to Submit

This submission is not achieved by wishing for it. It is built through practice.

Ask the right question first. Before acting on a strong feeling, whether anger, desire, or grievance, pause and ask: what did the Messenger ﷺ bring regarding this? Not what do I feel like doing.

Treat your own opinion as evidence against you, not for you, when it contradicts a clear text. If your heart resists a ruling, that resistance is information about the state of your heart, not information about the ruling.

Practice in the small things. A man who cannot submit his preference over what to eat, how to spend his time, or how to respond to a minor insult will not suddenly submit it in a major test. Build the muscle on the small matters so it holds in the large ones.

Remember that the Sahabah felt this pull too, and overcame it. They were human beings with human desires. Their virtue was not the absence of hawa. It was the discipline of bringing hawa under the authority of wahy every time the two conflicted.

Complete faith is not attained until one's love and hatred, his acceptance and rejection, all follow what the Messenger of Allah brought, not what the self prefers. (Imam al-Nawawi, Sharh Sahih Muslim)

Brothers, this is the standard we are climbing toward. Not perfection in a single day, but a heart that, more and more, finds ease in what Allah has decreed rather than resistance to it.

O Allah, make our inclinations follow what Your Messenger ﷺ brought, not what our own selves prefer.

O Allah, do not let us take our desires as a god beside You.

O Allah, grant us hearts that find no discomfort in Your rulings, even when they are difficult for us.

O Allah, strengthen us against the pull of hawa in this place and in every place.

O Allah, make us among those who restrain themselves out of awe of standing before You, and grant us Paradise as our home.

O Allah, purify our intentions and our inclinations until they are one with Your revelation.

O Allah, protect us from arrogance when the truth is difficult to accept.

O Allah, make the Quran and Sunnah the standard by which we judge ourselves, not our own selves the standard by which we judge the Quran and Sunnah.