Daily Times

Reclaim Your Heart is written by Yasmin Mogahed, a United States-based Muslim scholar who is known for her gift of captivating an entire audience with her thoughts and insightful reflections.

As a skilled creative writer, her literature speaks from the heart and is felt by millions around the world. After completing her graduate work, she taught Islamic Studies and served as a youth coordinator. Along with Reclaim your heart she is author many interesting and motivating books.

Her book Reclaim Your Heart – Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life’s Shackles reflects her ability to relate all intervals of life to one’s relationship with the Creator is a remedy for those seeking comfort and solace in this world. This book is not just another self-help book with technicalities and solution formulas. It is a book of internal revolution. Mogahed doesn’t just list off advices, but explains them with beautifully written metaphors, anecdotes, analogies and more. Surprisingly, though her language is eloquent in the use of metaphors and similes, her writing is simplistic. Anyone can pick up this book and have an easy time understanding the concepts she discusses. The simplicity makes it a quick read.

Yasmin Mogahed has a way of putting messages across extremely well. She breaks down life’s most pressing issues into small bits for ease of understanding and reflection; she has the power to makes her reader think – think about their life, their struggles and their relationships with both God and the people they love and interact with every day.

In the book “Reclaim Your Heart” Moghahed does not preach, nor does she write with self-righteousness shadowing her wisdom. She takes on many journeys. Her personal journey, the journeys of the prophets of Allah, the journey of the Qur’an – and within this, she allows to manifest all of it in a way that reminds a person of his own journey. Your own peaks and dips of faith, your own heartbreaks, your own disappointment and your attachment to the material world.

Throughout the book, though she covers many aspects of life and faith, she consistently reminds us of purpose. When she talks about the journey of this life, the broken hearts, the pain and the difficulties she does not leave the reader there unattended. Instead in the next chapter she talks about Detachment from pain. “That broken heart and pain are lessons and signs for us. They are warnings that something is wrong,” she writes. We want to remember and believe that Allah’s wisdom is stronger than our desires. We want to remember that pain means he has saved us from something worse, but then why are we hurting so much? Mogahed not only shows reader the mercy behind pain, but the practical reasons for it. Not only she simplifies the complex concept of pain, but she also takes us to see it through the lens of spiritual gratitude.

Yasmin Mogahed has a way of putting messages across extremely well. She breaks down life’s most pressing issues into small bits for ease of understanding and reflection; she has the power to makes her reader think — think about their life, their struggles and their relationships with both God and the people they love and interact with every day

I liked reading the first half more than the rest of the book, mostly because the chapters give so much depth to the title of the book. As for the second half of the book, it has worthy advice as well, but the book no longer feels cohesive. The chapters don’t flow with one another as before because the topics vary and no longer focus on reclaiming our hearts.

I like this part from the book the most, where she is talking about pain.

“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.

But a very important part which made me like this that whole chapter dedicated to women’s status in Islam, a very important topic of conversation but not usually discussed much amongst us.

So you are honoured. But it is not by your relationship to men – either being them, or pleasing them. Your value as a woman is not measured by the size of your waist or the number of men who like you. Your worth as a human being is measured on a higher scale: a scale of righteousness and piety. And your purpose in life – despite what the fashion magazines say – is something more sublime than just looking good for men.

There is so much beauty in this book to discover. The language and explanations used are also very simple. At the end of the book, reader is be greeted with a collection of poems by the author herself – a nice touch to end the reading experience

On the whole, Reclaim Your Heart is an absolute self-help book. Through her words, she gives gentle advices that reminds the reader of the powerful Lord above, who does not abandon His beings and has the wisdom that we cannot comprehend. She has an amazing writing style that is also very inspiring. She shows the reader that we can live in this world but still detach ourselves from it, simply by reminding ourselves that the perspective may only be relative to that moment and may mislead.

She makes the reader think according to her views. Thus through her powerful words, she motivates and encourages to reclaim the control of heart just as the title suggests and convinces the reader that they are stronger than what they think of themselves to overcome the desires of the self.

The writer is a student of English Literature and Linguistics at Air University. She can be reached at haleemas606@gmail.com