The Coolness of the Eyes and Why This World Can Never Fully Satisfy Us

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The great Muslim scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah, once said:

الفقر لي وصف ذات لازم أبداً كما الغني أبداً وصف له ذاتي

“Neediness is an intrinsic attribute of mine, inseparable from me forever, just as self-sufficiency, forever, is an intrinsic attribute of Him.”

This episode of the Middle Ground Podcast is from our Friday Night Ḥalaqah (September 25 2026). Imām Marc expands on a ḥadīth qudsī from Friday’s khutbah in which Allāh declares that He has prepared for His devoted worshippers “what no eye has seen and no ear has heard,” tied to the verse in Sūrah al-Sajdah that “no soul knows what has been prepared for it,” the qurrat al-’ayn — the “coolness of the eyes.” The contrast he draws is between this life, which by design leaves us restless with our eyes always chasing novelty, our hearts stirred by trends that expire, and the Here-After, where satisfaction never runs out, illustrated by the description of a man in paradise who gazes at his wife for forty years and never tires. So the beginning of training our palate, our souls, to pursue what actually satisfies rather than what merely gives a temporary dopamine hit, is the topic of this episode.