that brings no benefit, there is no space left in it to be occupied with Allah, nor to come to know His Names, His Attributes, and His rulings.

The reason is that the heart’s receptiveness is like that of the ear: when it listens to discourse other than Allah’s, no attentiveness or understanding remains for His discourse. In the same way, when it inclines toward a love other than the love of Allah, no inclination remains for loving Him; and when the heart speaks with something other than His remembrance, no room is left in it to speak His remembrance, just as is the case with the tongue.

For this reason, it is recorded in the Ṣaḥīḥ (1) that the Prophet ﷺ said, “For one of you to have his belly filled with pus until it bursts forth is better for him than to have it filled with poetry.” Thus he clarified that a person’s inner core can indeed be filled with poetry.

In the same fashion it can be filled with specious arguments, doubts, fantasies, imagined scenarios (2) that have no reality, knowledge that yields no benefit, pleasantries, witticisms, anecdotes, and the like.

When the heart is filled with such things, the realities conveyed by the Qur’an and the knowledge through which it attains perfection and felicity come to it but find neither vacancy nor welcome; they therefore move past it and bypass it to some other place. It is like offering sincere advice to a heart already crammed full of its opposite, leaving no entry point: it will not accept the counsel, nor will it penetrate; it merely passes over, not settling within.

For this reason it has been said (3):

“Purify your heart of all but Us, and you will encounter Us,
Our sanctuary is open to every soul that has been made pure.”