Friday Sermon: Make your private behaviour better than your public behaviour

In this series of Friday Sermon's, we shall be focused on improving our character and mannerisms. Each week we will pick one Akhlaqi principle and delve into some of its features, the idea being that from one week to the next we make a special and dedicated intention to implement this particular practise. God-willing over the week, this one practise will help us to improve that element of our moral nature, preparing us for the following weeks principle.

This of course is based on the noble character of the holy Prophet Muhammad (s) who the holy Qur'an tells us, "Indeed in the Messenger of Allah, you have an excellent model for the one who seeks God, the Day of Judgement and remembers God unceasingly" (33:21).

Our first Akhlaqi principle is to make our private behaviour surpass our public behaviour. It is often the case that our public behaviour is better than our private behaviour. This is because when we are in public, we want the best version of ourselves to be seen and so we become very aware of how we act; when in our private circles however, we revert to default behaviours or are less concerned with how people see us.

This manifests itself in many ways: In public, I may never swear but in private I may. In private I will watch things I would never watch in public. In public the length of my Salaat is very long but in private it is extremely quick or with the TV still on. In public I will smile and talk nicely to people at the Mosque but when I return home, I am grumpy and would never spend time talking to my family and so on.

This is problematic because of the hypocrisy it builds within us and normalises this dichotomy, entrenching its practises further. The narrations specify that when our inward state is corrupted so too will our outward behaviours be, as we will not always be able to control ourselves and these inward states will manifest themselves. But similarly when our outward behaviours are problematic such as acting differently, it will corrupt our inward realities. For example one narration states, "When the outward gets corrupted, the inward also gets corrupted."