What is barakah, and how can you achieve it in your profession | 𝙰𝙻 𝙸𝙺𝙷𝙻𝙰𝚂

What is barakah, and how can you achieve it in your professional life?


Have you ever planned to get all your tasks done during the day, but time seems to slip out of your hands without getting everything accomplished? Have you ever slept for a solid eight hours but still felt sleepy the next day at work? Has it ever happened that your money that was supposed to suffice until the end of the month was just not enough? Many of us have had these experiences: times when we feel like there is no barakah in our lives, in our time, our decisions, our money and even our abilities. When faced with issues such as these, people typically turn towards their resources and other worldly means to solve their problems. But there might be an underlying issue, and that is this: barakah is missing from our lives and our actions.

Understand What Barakah Actually Is

Barakah is an Arabic word that has three meanings:

The first meaning is النماء و الزيادة which is “growth and increase”.
Something that possesses barakah increases and grows beyond ordinary expectations.

Let’s look at it like this: according to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But when an action has barakah in it, it defies this law of Newton and even a small action may have a huge reaction! For example, you plant one seed in the ground and expect one tree to grow; but if you plant one seed and it grows ten trees – well, that’s something beyond ordinary expectations. This is barakah. When an initial action is small but the resulting reaction is unexpectedly large, this means the reaction must have had barakah.

The second meaning is الاستمرارية or ”continuity”.
The Arabs have a saying: ابتركت السماء “the sky has poured continuously, when the rain keeps coming down." So consistency is also among the meanings of barakah. The increase is continuous and not for a limited time.

The third meaning of barakah is “something that is stable in its place”
The Arabs also say: ابتركت الجمل for a camel that has its feet fixed in the sand. So it’s not only increasing continuously but it is a consistent increase as well. So barakah is an increase that doesn’t lose stability like, say, a Lego tower, which gets more and more unstable as its height increases.

Source of Blessing

Allah says in the Quran; (55:78) تباارك اسم ربك “blessed is the name of your Master”. Which means that whatever you do starting with the name of Allah, it will produce goodness and that goodness will grow and keep on increasing and it will not go away. Barakah is such a blessing from Allah on Muslims.

As Muslims we should always be optimistic because, whatever we do starting with the name of Allah, will grow beyond our expectations.

There is a physical world around us that we see. Islam teaches us that there is also a spiritual world, and barakah is what is beyond our ordinary expectations because it comes from Allah.

What is it Like to be Blessed

Now we look at some examples from the lives of our heroes in Islam, our Islamic scholars.

Imam nawawi RA was known for sitting in at least ten circles of knowledge every single day, and he wrote some of the most important books, including 40 Ahadeeth al Nawawi and Riyadh us Saleheen. He died at the age of 44, yet he accomplished so much in this short span of time. There was barakah in his life.

Imam bukhari RA whose books we all have on our shelves even today and are well known for their authenticity, used to perform ghusl and perform istikhara, and he asked Allah for guidance before jotting down a hadith in his book. He would also finalize each sahih hadeeth in the prophet’s SAW mosque sitting near the Rawdah (the grave of the Prophet SAW) and he would seek barakah from Allah in his work.

Why did he do the extra effort? It’s because barakah is from Allah and He puts goodness in whatever He wills, beyond our ordinary expectations which no statistics, no mathematics, no scientific explanation can ever encompass.

To be continued...

@AL_IKH_LAS - Islamic Educational Channel