Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

https://youtu.be/Sd-8jKCk80w Auto-generated transcript: My dear brothers and sisters, I'm standing on a little hillock in Mactayo Park which looks down on the Connecticut River which you see there in the middle distance and part from snow melt, part from rain, the river is full back to back. It is very cold. It is right now it says feels like minus 11. I think the actual temperature is about maybe five or six degrees which feels much colder. Alhamdulillah today I want to talk about and remind myself and you. The question that people ask me, Allah bless them, they say how can we and how should we introduce Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to people? How can we kindle or we can't kindle or obviously even torment when we present Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala as the glory and majesty in a way which kindles in the hearts of people the love for Allah, the love for His Rasul, alayhi salatu wasalam and the desire to follow this beautiful religion that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala blessed us with, al-Islam. I can do no better than to take lessons and share my lessons in this line from the Quran. So the first three ways of introducing Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The first and foremost is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's introduction in the Quran al-Kareem. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala introduced Himself. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told us who He is and for example Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said qul hu Allahu ahad, Allahu samad, lam yaleed wa lam yulad, wa lam ya qullahu kufwan ahad. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said say to them, Ya Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam, that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala He is one and one not as in a number which is which can be multiplied or divided but one as in unique. Hu Allahu al-Ahad, al-Ahadu samad, lam yaleed wa lam yulad and He is complete and He has no needs and He has no offspring and He was not born and He wasn't He didn't begot He didn't have any son or something and this is a shout out towards Isa alayhi salam and the belief that they have the false belief that He is son of God. Allah is making this very clear. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is saying no it's not this and wa lam ya qullahu kufwan ahad and they're saying He is free from all needs and desires and everyone needs Him and He doesn't need anybody. This is Allah unique. Allah is Allah. Lay saka mislihi shay'un, wa hu wa sami'ul basir. There's nothing that can be compared to Him and He is the all seeing and the all knowing. So and there are many other ayat in the Quran. There are take from for example ayat al-kursi, take the last parts of surah al-hashr, take the beginning of surah al-mulk and many other surahs all of them introduce us to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. All of these are introductions of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala which Allah gave. So that is one very very very powerful way of introducing Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Simply quote what Allah said because no one can introduce Allah better than He introduced Himself. So just quote what He said. Who is Allah? This is who Allah said He is. Now for that it's very important to be able to recite the Quran correctly. That is very important. Don't take the time and trouble to learn how to decide the Quran al-karim correctly. I'm not talking about so much about the the lahm, the tune, the qiraat. I'm talking about tajweed. I'm talking about reciting it correctly so that the meaning doesn't change and so that people when they hear and they listen to the Quran they are clear in their minds and they can feel the glory and majesty of the kalam of Allah. That is very important right. So don't recite the Quran in a way that people do not feel its glory and majesty. So very important to be able to recite the Quran al-karim correctly and recite. So say introduce Allah by simply reciting the Quran. This is what Rasulullah did all the time. When people asked him about Allah SWT, he recited Quran and people came to Islam because they heard the Quran and these were linguists, these were people who were the people of the language and they said this is not the word of any human being. There is no human being who can speak like this. Because they were the experts and they said but we are the experts and we know that we cannot speak like this. So this is something which is divine. The second way is by talking about the creation of Allah SWT, by showing the creation of Allah SWT external and internal. Because Allah SWT mentioned this. Allah taught us how to introduce Himself. Allah said verily and truly in the creation of the heavens and the earth and in the alternation of the day and the night, there are signs for people of intelligence. Ayat. Remember Allah did not say verses ayat. There is a very important thing and on the side note I want to mention this. When we translate the word ayah as verse, linguistically, grammatically maybe it is correct but it

Auto-generated transcript:Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic34 Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic This is very, very important to keep in mind because what happens especially today, only bad news sells. So almost everything you hear, whether it's on television, whether it's on social media, whether it's on newspaper, is all negative. It's all negative. So many people died, this happened, that happened, demolished, war, this not. So our whole mind, the mind and the body gets affected, heart and mind gets affected by what we see. That's the reason why it is so important to make sure that you see the right things. And I have a principle that I try to follow, which is that I don't look at anything that I cannot control. So for example, I don't watch any of the Palestine videos and stuff because what is good about watching a child being killed, tell me? What is good about seeing a building being demolished and mothers crying their guts out because their children are blind in front of their eyes? What's the good of that? I can't control it, I can't stop it. I would gladly do anything to stop it, but it's not my control. So by looking at it again and again and again and again, all that it does is it drags me down. What I can do is to make dua to Allah SWT, which I do constantly, Alhamdulillah. What I can do is, you know, if there is any relief things going on or whatnot, I can donate to that, which I try to do to the best of my ability. But other than that, I don't watch all this stuff. And that's why I tell people don't even have a TV in the house. We don't have. We haven't had a TV in our house for the last 35 years. We are probably the only house in America which has no TV. No TV? We never had. The past 35 years. Alhamdulillah. You don't miss anything because there's nothing great about consuming content which is created by somebody else for their reasons. And you are, all you can do is consume. In front of the TV, you have no control. You're just consuming that content and it's damaging your life, it's damaging your heart, damaging your mind and nothing you can do about it. So throw out the televisions. They'd make a record or a video smashing the television and then post it on YouTube. You probably get some money for it. Only bad news. The reason I'm saying this is because what then happens is, a friend of mine tells me, I'm working for this company but I won't know what will happen in the future. I said, of course, nobody knows. He said, no, no, no, but you see, one man in this company was sacked just overnight even though he had been working there for 25 years, just like that. So I don't know what will happen to me. So I asked him, I said, how many employees does the company have? He says, 5,000. I said, how many got sacked? One. Now you want to look at that one person who got sacked or you want to look at the 4,999 people who did not get sacked and where do you link yourself? What can happen to me? What is the likelihood? Law of averages says that what happens to the most is more likely to happen, right? So what's likely to happen to you? Nothing. You will be happy. Like, 409. One man got sacked. We don't even know why he got sacked. God knows what happened there, right? Allah knows best. But the tendency, the mental tendency, it drags you to the negative. So I remind myself when you don't get into this spin, Allah said, I am for you what you expect me to be. Expect the best from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. My chef used to say, in this country you don't see that because there are not enough poor people I suppose. At least not where we live. But in my country we have on Eid days and so on, so on we have tam am. So you cook a lot of food, usually it's biryani, so you cook biryani and then there is Sufarah Dastakhan and anybody can come and sit and eat. Anybody, from the street, anywhere. People know that this is happening here, they come from all over the place. Hundreds of people, they come and they sit and eat. Now my chef used to say, supposing if I am doing this in my house, I am having this, I am daawat. So there are big Dastarkhans and food is there and people from all the villages, everybody is coming and they are sitting and they are eating. And he used to say, supposing I, he said if you come and you also go and sit on there. And as you sit down there and the servers, they are dishing out the food. But as the server comes close to you, your friend who owns this thing, who is giving this tam, he sees you. So what will he do? He will come, he will catch you by your hand, he will pull you up from the place where you are sitting and he will take you away. Right? Now if that happens, what is the thought in your mind? If you are thinking, if that happens and you are thinkin

Auto-generated transcript:As-salātu wa s-salāmu ala ash-sharafī al-anbiyā'ī wa al-mursaleen, Muḥammadun Rasūlu Llāhī sallallahu alayhi wa alā alihi wa sābihi wa sallam, tasleemun kathirun kathirun. From Mabādhu, my brothers and sisters, if there is one... if you ask me to give you one single line or one single thought or one single word, which is the secret of success in life, one word, that word is judgment. Judgment. The ability to choose, the ability to judge between multiple options. This is the secret of success. One single word, judgment. Somebody with the right judgment will succeed, somebody with the wrong judgment will fail. The options are the same. Right? Take for example, careers. Should I work for this company or that company? Your judgment decides the future of your career. Marriage. Should I marry this woman or that woman? If you are a lady, this man or that man? That will decide the rest of your life. House. I want to buy a house. Which house? I have the money. Judgment. Car. You take it. Anything. It is your judgment and the correctness of that judgment which will decide whether you will succeed or fail. Now Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala made it easy because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala did not leave us to guess. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told us. The muhajid, when he calls the adhan, what does he say? And then? Come to salah, come to success. So Allah has told us where is success? In salah. Right? That is the reason why, see the beauty of the Quran, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala addressed the believers. The believers. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, do you believe? So first and foremost we have to decide, are we the believers? Because you know and I know that in the Quran al-Karim, anything which starts with that is an order of Allah, command of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So am I a believer? First question. If I'm not a believer then do what you want. But if I'm a believer what must I do? Allah said, when you hear the calling to the salah, when the time for salah comes, what must you do? Stroll along quietly, nicely, like in the moonlight. Others say no, run. Make effort. What? Rush there. And then what? Leave all your selling. Now imagine, see the beauty of the Quran. There is bayah and there is shara. There is selling and there is buying. Allah did not say don't buy. Allah said don't sell because if you don't sell you cannot buy. How will you buy if the shop is closed? So Allah did not leave it to the buyer. He didn't say no, even if the shop is open don't sell. Finish, khalas, bant, tukkan, khalam. So that applies not only to selling, applies to everything. All your work, stop it. Rush towards the salah. And then Allah is saying, in that there is benefit for you, that is the best for you, in kumtum ta'ala if you could understand. Why is Allah saying that? Because after all when we are doing business, we are going to school, we are going to college, we are going to university, we are working in jobs, why? Because there is benefit. There is benefit and nobody does this, right? We don't say don't go to school, leave your school, leave your college, don't go to work, sit at home. No, of course not. You should go to school, go to college, get a good career, study, you know, do your business well and so on and so forth. There is benefit for you. What Allah is saying, there is greater benefit in leaving that and going to salah. Not because it will harm you, but because it will benefit you. If you shut the shop, it will benefit you. If you leave the work, it will benefit you. So obviously if you don't leave the work, does it benefit you? That's why I said judgment, right? Where do we see benefit for ourselves? Here is Allah's command. As I said, Allah didn't leave us to guess. Allah is telling us, benefit is here, come. Allah will give you. Then you might say, but what about my one hour of work I will miss? One hour of business I will miss? One hour of school I will miss? Yes, of course. If I am going somewhere, if I want to travel say from here to Florida, then I have to buy a ticket, right? The ticket costs money. So what will I say? I lost $200. What do you mean lost $200? You spent $200 to buy a ticket to go to Florida. You went to Florida for a good reason. That reason is better than $200. You went to meet your family or friends. You went to make a $10 million deal. You went to do whatever you want to do, Alhamdulillah. For which you spent $200 buying a plane ticket. Is that a waste? How is it a waste? So I lose one hour of business. I shut my shop for an hour. I, maybe I have to make up one class in college or school or wherever I am studying. In exchange for that, what did I get? I got the promise of Allah's command, that there is benefit for you in this if you come. So ask yourself, I should ask myself, what is my value for the promise of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala? If Allah subha

Auto-generated transcript:Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. My dear respected brothers, sisters, elders, I remind myself and you that mankind, all human beings, irrespective of where they are, where they come from, which country they live in, what nationality, what race, what religion, all human beings live a life of anxiety. It's only the level of anxiety which differs, it's only the things that they are anxious about which differs, but they all live a life of anxiety. And who are the saints? Allah Almighty said, Those who believe and are righteous. And what do they have? They have good tidings in this world and in the Hereafter. Allah Almighty said, Do not change. Why? I remind myself and you that the only people who are free from anxiety are the Awliya of Allah. Those special people who Allah Almighty chooses and who Allah Almighty has close to Him. And Allah Almighty said about them, They have no fear and they have no anxiety, they have no sadness. No fear on them, no anxiety. They have no fear. Fear is with respect to the future, what will happen? And sadness and regret is with respect to the past. They do not have fear because they have Tawakkul on Allah SWT. And they have Rida'a Bil Khada. So Alhamdulillah, whatever Allah does, good for me. And I have Tawakkul on Allah. He will only do good. I am an Abduh of Allah. I will do my best to obey Allah SWT, to fulfill the purpose of my creation, which is Ibadah of Allah. He said, I have not created a human for anything other than my worship, so I worship Allah SWT. That is my job. So no fear about the future. And as far as sadness and regret is concerned, yes we make mistakes, yes we commit sins, yes we forget. And for this Allah SWT has said, Tawakkul. Make a step forward. Make a step forward. Look, look how Allah SWT says, He says, Say, O My servants, those who are prophets, witnesses and witnesses of Allah, Say, O My servants, those who have transgressed against their own selves, do not be deceived by Allah's mercy. Allah forgives all sins. He is the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful. See the mercy of Allah. Allah SWT said, He is calling the people who commit sins His slaves. Allah is not saying, Say, O My slaves, who are the Ambiya, the Shuhada, the Salih. No, Allah says, Say to them My slaves, who? Those who disobeyed Me. Those who committed sins, those who transgressed against themselves because nobody can harm Allah. When we commit a sin, we are harming ourselves. Ask yourself, somebody who is a drunkard, who is he harming? Somebody who smokes cigarette after cigarette, who is he harming? Somebody who is gambling, who is he harming? Somebody who is a druggy, who is he harming? Somebody who lies and cheats and slanders and abuses people, who is he harming? Himself, even in this dunya. Even though some of his actions or all actions may harm other people, they first harm the individual. This is the figment of the imagination the shaitan has put into our, may Allah protect us from shaitan. And we think all of this is fun. Dying of cancer is fun. Go look in the hospitals. See how fun it is to die of lung cancer. To lie in a gutter, in your own vomit is fun. But shaitan does not let you see that. Allah is saying, these are my slaves. And the shaitan says, do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Surely Allah will forgive all sins. And surely Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala huwa al ghafurur rahim. He is the most forgiving, the most merciful. So the awliya of Allah have no fear because they have tawakkul. And they have ridha bil khada. And they have no hudan, they have no sadness. They have no fear. They have no fear. They have ridha bil khada. And they have no hudan, they have no sadness. Because they make haste in seeking forgiveness of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Rasulullah s.a.w, the one who is free from sin, the one who Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala forgave the past and the future. The best of the best of all creation. He says, I make istighfar 70 times a day. And in another narration 100 times a day. The sahabah said we count it 100 times a day. How much istighfar do I make? How much do you make? Make these things, making 100 times istighfar. Astaghfarullah illa ila ila ila huwa al hiw al khayyum wa atubh barai. Make this into a farthing in your life. Right? Absolute farthing. There is no excuse for this. Say alhamdulillah. 100 times. And if Allah used to have it, we make more and more inshallah. But 100 times astaghfarullah every single day. What is the benefit of seeking forgiveness? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will open doors for us where there are no doors. Allah will solve our problems. Allah will remove us from our difficulties. I did not say that. The nabi of Allah said this in the hadith in Musnad Ahmad. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala himself said this. Who is a Muttakhi? The one who seeks forgiveness. The one who is constantly aware of the importance of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in his life and is constantly seeking for

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honorable prophets and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, and upon his family, peace and blessings be upon him. My brothers and sisters, the... We normally utilize or we apply two kinds of criteria to deciding whether any of our spending is better or worse, which is a better place to spend. Right? Two questions. I'm not talking about any financial plan. Generally speaking, if you want to spend money, then one criterion is we say, we compare between something which has... which can give you pleasure, so short-term pleasure versus something which has a long-term benefit. Right? So which do you... which is the better one to spend? Short-term pleasure, yeah, of course. You have a party, you do something, you go to... you have a holiday, you spend money on that, you, you know, you buy something temporarily. But the same money, if you spend to buy in an investment, right? To buy gold, to buy long-term investment, to invest in a house and so on, then between the two, anybody will say the second option is the better option because you put your money where it is going to give you long-term benefit. If somebody takes... takes even time for the... for that matter. For example, our children, they go to school, college. They will want to go and play, go for a game or something with their friends and so forth, right? It's a good one, they learn. Nothing wrong with that. But if they are doing it and the cost of their studies, so if they have to go study, there's an exam, they leave the exam, they go play cricket or they play soccer or something, what will you say? The sort of question is, is it halal or halal? The question is what are you doing with the time? This time you should have been spending, studying for the exam, which has a long-term benefit on your life. Instead of that, you are playing a game, the game you can play anytime. You don't have to play the game just then. And even if you don't play the game, so what? Whereas if you fail the exam, then it is likely to have a long-term negative effect on your life. So this is how we compare. Where am I going to spend more time? I should spend more on that compared to where I'm going to spend less time, right? That's the basic principle. Sayyidna Usman bin Affan ad-Dhaya Lhanu died in the year 656. Today we are in 2025. So 2025 minus 656 is 1369. Right? 1369, do the math. 2025 minus 656 is 1369. Sayyidna Usman bin Affan ad-Dhaya Lhanu has been in the Barzakh and he continues to be in Barzakh for 1369 years. So how many years in the Barzakh am I planning to spend? How many years are you planning to spend? You're going there, believe me. We will go there. The day we see Malakur Mawd, the door opens. And we will remain there until Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala calls us, until the surah is blown out. Until Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala calls us, until the surah is blown, Israfil A.S., Rasulullah S.A.W. said Israfil has the trumpet to his lips and his eyes are fixed on Allah. He is in that position. Allah knows time has no meaning in that context. Thousands of years, millions of years, Allah knows best. So that instantly He will blow the surah and then we will come out of our graves. That period is Barzakh. So how many years have you got? The reason I'm asking is because we spend money. We work hard. We make dua for this life. This life is all on. 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, the Friendly Brothers, Friendly Ice Cream because you are, give you local examples. Friendly's Ice Cream was started, the company had started in 1935 by the two Blake Brothers. One of them died at the age of 102. And the other one, Priestley Blake, who built a house just after Long Meadow in Summers. When you're driving from here, you cross into Summers. On the left you see a house called Monticello. The name is written on the wall. It is the exact replica of Thomas Jefferson's house. Priestley Blake built it at a cost of $7 million, exact replica, to celebrate his 100th birthday. And he had his birthday party and he sold it. He never lived in the house. He sold it at a loss because the problem with big ticket properties is you can never sell them. Who's going to pay $7 million to buy that house? So he sold it at a loss and then he bought it back again at another loss. Eventually he died at the age of 106. So we spend money for this life. What is our spend for the barzakh? I gave you the example of Sayyidna Asma Ibn Asma Nadell Anhu because Sayyidna Asma Nadell Anhu made wakaf of one of his date gardens. And that date garden is there till today in Madinah. The Saudi government looks after it. It's still a wakaf. And every year the harvest is donated, sadaka, for 1369 years. And of course as we know, Allah knows it will continue until

Auto-generated transcript:Alhamdulillah, my dear brothers and sisters, we heard the story of Ahnab bin Khayz, Rahmatullah Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, and his humility and his figure. The main thing is this, his figure, his concern, the deep concern that he had for himself and his connection and his position with Allah. We live in a life with concerns. There is nobody on the face of the planet who lives or who lived or who will come in the future to live until the Day of Judgment. Whether it is the Ambiya' alayhi was-salam himself, whether it is the Rasul Muhammad sallallahu alaihi was-salam himself, or whether it is the worst of the people, everyone had concerns. There is no intelligent human being who can say that I have no concern. If you have no concern, you have no brain. As simple as that. You have no clue. You don't know where you are. You are in some kind of, you know, God knows what. Everybody has concerns. The question is what are those concerns? What am I worried about? What am I concerned about? The game that shaitan plays and has played and is so successful is that he has flipped the things that we should be concerned about and replaced them with things that Allah has guaranteed. Allah said, don't worry. Allah said, do not worry. Not your problem. I will take care of this. And shaitan said, no, no, no, hold on a second. Forget about that. This is what you should be concerned about. And things where Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, look out for that. Allah said, oh, you believe save yourselves and your ahlikum, your entire families from the fire. Allah did not say save yourself from hunger. Allah did not say save yourself from poverty. Allah did not say save yourself from poverty. Allah did not say save yourself from hunger. Allah did not say save yourself from poverty. Allah did not say save yourself from sickness. Allah said save yourself from the fire. So you say, okay, so I will do that. But what about hunger? What about poverty? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said this. He clearly mentioned this. Allah said, we feed you. Allah is the razaq. Allah is the razaq. And he feeds you with his power. I ask myself and you, what are we more concerned about? Our status in this dunya or our status with Allah? Our position in this dunya or our position with Allah? Our position with Allah? I'm not saying forget this. It's a question of which has priority. Which comes first? If somebody suddenly asks us a question, I'm not talking about in the majlis like this where you have been primed to give the right answer. I'm talking about just out of the blue. You are at your workplace or somewhere you're playing a game. Somebody stops you and says, name your three top concerns. Name your three top objectives. How many of us will say genuinely with that feeling and only we know the truth and only Allah knows the truth? How many of us will say that Allah must forgive me when I meet Him? Jannah is the result of that. We don't talk about Jannah. That Allah must forgive me when I meet Him. How many of us will say that? I'm not saying we don't believe. I'm saying top of the line, top of the line concern. We talk about careers. We talk about money. We talk about political ups and downs in society. We talk, do we have the forgiveness of Allah, the Rida of Allah as a top concern? I'm only saying top three. This should be the number one concern and frankly the only concern. Allah promised us food. Allah promised us our lifespan. Nobody can change that. Allah did not promise us Jannah. I remind myself in you. Allah did not promise Jannah to me. Allah did not promise Jannah to you. Even the ones who Allah promised Jannah to, the first of the human beings after the Ambiya' alayhimu s-salam, even he said, he said, I wish I was a blade of grass. I would dry up and blow away in the wind. So the question I want to ask myself and you is when we search and I'm not saying if we search, we need to search. If I search for myself in the Quran, where will I find myself? As I mentioned, Allah did not mention me by name. Allah did not mention to you by name. Allah mentioned people with certain qualities. Some of the ayahs I mentioned to you, they are not the only ayahs. Search for yourself. I was searching for myself. And then if I find myself in a place which is good, alhamdulillah, we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for istiqamat, for steadfastness to remain there. Because the key is to live by that and to die by that. It's not just enough to say, oh today alhamdulillah I'm good. Today I'm good, tomorrow I might not be good. I remind myself and you that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gave something in our control and Allah did not give some other things in our control. Everything to do with this dunya Allah did not give in our control. Allah told us ways, work hard, do this, do that, alhamdulillah. But Allah did not guarantee us anyth

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. My dear brothers, sisters, respected elders, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala jalla jalaluhu sent his kalam, his word, his speech with one purpose only, purpose. Al naqsadul nuzoorul kalamullah, huwa wahid faqad. That we should reflect on it, tadabbur fiha, and change our lives and live according to it. The reading of the Quran, the writing of the Quran, the tafsir of the Quran, everything to do with the Quran, to learn to read it well and properly according to the usul of tajweed, to read, to learn the different qara'at, beautiful calligraphy, writing of the Quran, printing of the Quran. You name it, all of those things are important, but they are not the maqsad of the revelation of the qalaq. There is only one maqsad, there is only one reason, there is only one thing that the Quran came for, and that is to be lived by. When we think about these two things, we don't look at them as two opposite. We don't say it is not important to learn to read, but it is important to live. That's a stupid statement. To be able to live by the Quran, you must also know how to read it properly, you must understand it, and so on and so on. But none of that is the purpose of the revelation. The reason I'm saying that is because this is what has happened to us, the Muslims, after the time of the blessed generations, the generation of the Sahaba, the Tabain and the Tabatabain, people became experts and they focused on one aspect of the Quran, and illa mashallah, they left the issue of living by it. They put that aside. Obviously, this is a generalization, it doesn't apply to everybody, but we have people who are ufaz, we have people who are qurra, we have people who make tafsir, we have people who do all kinds of things with the Quran, but if you look at their lives, and may Allah make you and me separate from that, you do not find a reflection of the Quran in the life of the person. One of the great Tabain, Anaf Bil Qais, Tahaatul Ali, he read the ayah, لَقَتَنْزَلْنَا إِلَيْكُمْ كِتَابًا فِيهِ ذِكْرُكُمْ أَفَلَى تَعْفِلُونَ In Surah Al-Anbiya, Allah swt said, indeed, we have sent down for you, mankind, a book in which you are mentioned. There is your zikr, there is your reminder. Will you not understand? I'm talking about people who understood the purpose of the Quran. So Anaf Bin Qais, the son of Anur Ahmad, read this thing, he said, Allah said, I'm mentioned in the Quran, so where am I? Where is my name? Where have I been mentioned? Allah said, فِيهِ ذِكْرُكُمْ, you are mentioned in there. Where am I? Now we know of course that Allah swt did not mention anyone by name, except the Anbiya and among the Ba'ad al-Anbiya, Zayd bin Harithah is the only one who is mentioned by name. So we know that your name, my name is not in the Quran. But we know that Allah swt mentioned people and their qualities. And Allah swt mentioned what would happen to people with those qualities. So Allah swt mentioned people with certain qualities, and then he said people with these qualities, this will be their ending, this is where they will end up. And therefore we need to look for ourselves in these quality definitions and say, where do I fit in? If I fit in with the people whose qualities are good and whose ending is good, then Alhamdulillah. But if I fit in with people whose qualities are not good and whose ending is not good, then it is time to change. So when Anaf Bin Qais, Rahmatullah Ali searched in the Quran, he found that with some people Allah swt said, He said they are the people, Allah said these are people who sleep but little at night. And the rest of the time they are praying, they are making sujood, they are making salah, rukuh, between a state of fear of Allah swt, punishment and hope in Allah swt's forgiveness. And in the hours before dawn, they are found asking and seeking Allah swt's forgiveness. And in their property, Allah said there was the haq, the right of the sa'il wal mahroum, of the one who asks for help and the one who needs help but does not ask. See the haqqu lisa'iri wal mahroum, Allah is not saying they give to the sa'il and the mahroum, Allah said no, they consider it to be the right of the other person. So I am not doing a favour, I am only fulfilling the right of the other person. Now think about this, Anaf Bin Qais, Rahmatullah Ali, Allah, Allah of course knows best, but if you ask me and say did he not fit this, was he not among the people who prayed extensively in the night, was he not among the people who made istighfar lots and lots of times, was he not among the people who were generous to a fault as far as their charity is concerned, I would say yes, without a doubt. But see the inkisar, see the humbleness, the humility of the people of truth. Anaf Bin Qais, Anaf Ya Allah Anur, Rahmatullah Ali, read these ayat and he said, Ya Allah, I am not from these peop

Auto-generated transcript:My brothers and sisters, I remind myself anew that if you want to measure success and failure in life, how do you measure it? Any ordinary person. I want to measure, say take my career, if I have a successful career or my career going down the drain, how do I measure that? Marriage, is it successful or not successful? Children, I'm raising children, successful or not successful? How? Compared with? Others? That's one way. Pure reviews, pure comparisons. Effectively, whether you do it comparatively, you do it with pure reviews, you do it some other way, you are basically measuring your assets and liabilities, right? What did I gain? What did I lose? So what did I spend to get what? What is profit? Profit is where you spend less to get more. You cannot measure profit only by looking at what you have. You have to see at what cost did I get it. So if I got something which has high value at a lower cost, then I made a profit. But if I got the same thing at its regular cost, then it's not a profit. I got the market value. If I paid more for it, then I have actually the same thing, but I made a loss. I remind myself when you... that when we stand before Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, it is the same standard, the same criterion, the same measurement, measuring stick we should use. What did you spend and what do you get? What did you spend, what do you get? In this world, in our life, we have the opportunity to do two things. One is we have the opportunity to spend things which have everlasting value. Or we have the opportunity to spend something which has temporary value. So if you spend something which has temporary value and get something which has everlasting value, then you are on to a good thing. That is the best way of living life. I'm giving something which I would have lost anyway and I got something which is mine forever. But if I do the opposite, I'm giving up something which I could have had forever to get something which I would lose anyway. Makes no sense, right? If I give up something which I could have kept forever, an earning asset which would have been mine forever, I give it away and I got something which at the most is temporary, I will lose it anyway. That's a dumb deal. But the opposite, if I am spending something which is temporary, in any case I would have lost it. And in exchange for that I get something which is going to be mine forever, that's a fantastic deal. Just to give you an example, we talk about charity. We are coming to Ramadan, so we are going to get some fundraising here. We talk about charity. So give in the path of Allah, sacrifice in the path of Allah. I tell people, forget this word sacrifice. It's a lie. There is no sacrifice in Islam. What are you doing? You are taking some part of your wealth which Allah gave you. Let's face it, how many of us stand here and give the equivalent of the value of your car which you are driving? I am not saying nobody does it, but how many? So you give something and in addition, by giving that what are you getting? We are getting an everlasting reward with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Allah said this is with Allah and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will return it to you in keeping with His majesty embrace. The minimum of that is man ja'abil hasanati falahu ashur amasalia. Someone who brings one hasana, Allah will give him ten likewise. And then Allah said He will multiply that by 700 and begai risa. So something, now you say okay, if I don't give that, sure it's your wealth you can keep it. It's not haram not to give, but even if you keep it, how long will you have it? You don't have to die to lose it. You lose it probably but before that in many ways. Whereas if you take this and give it in the path of Allah, effectively what am I doing? I am transferring my wealth. Whenever I think about charity I think of it as wealth transfer. I am taking it from this account and putting it into another account. That's it, wealth transfer. It's very easy to understand for those of you who have spent any time in the Middle East, it's very easy to understand that because in the Middle East there's no such thing as a green card. There's no such thing as permanent residency. There's no such thing as citizenship. You can stay there for you know 100 years, they still won't give you citizenship. You still have to go back to wherever you came from. So people are used to this concept of earning, working very hard, deliberately living in very modest circumstances and transferring all the rest of their surplus money back home to whichever country, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt or wherever it is, they send the money back to their home country. They can actually afford to live in a, you know, they don't stop it from doing that. I mean if you live in Dubai you can afford to live in or any country, whether it matter, any of the

Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon His servants and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and upon his family, and upon the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him. And many more. My brothers and sisters, the other day we talked about... I talked about needs and wants. And I mentioned to you and I said to you that the root of all problems, the root of all misery is when people convert their wants into needs. But if you keep needs as needs, and a need is something which if you don't have it, it will result in harm. Dharuri. The absence of which will create Dharar. Something which is critical, essential, the absence of that will result in harm. It's a need. Anything which does not fall into that category, it's something which is nice to have, something which you will enjoy, something which is, you know, which will make you happy and so on. But it's not something which is essential for survival. That's not a need, it's a want. Now if you convert these wants into needs, if you bring them into that scope of needs, then automatically your stress goes up, the amount of money you need to earn goes up, the space you need to live goes up, the number of people you have to satisfy and make happy goes up. And when all of these things go up, your own happiness goes down. Now in this context, the thing I want to say to you is this, second step of this, which is that you will find in life, and either take my word for it now and look at yourself and if you need to change, change, or wait for the next ten years, wait for the next twenty years and you will discover for yourself. Except that if you take my word for it now and do something to change yourself, you will benefit and if you don't, if you wait, then you will discover in another way which will be highly painful and you cannot change that. Now and that is that discipline always beats talent. Discipline always beats talent. Discipline always beats talent. You can be the most talented person in the world, but if you are not disciplined, that talent will never flower, that talent will never do anything good for you. Now take for example, think of artists, think of musicians, think of since you guys are interested in sport, think of great basketball players, great soccer players, great football players, great cricket players and so on and so on. And people who seem to be tremendously talented, they say, but this person has absolute talent. And then go into their life and see the number of hours of practice per day that they put into their game. I was watching Tiger Woods tournament last night. It's almost magical the way the guy puts, the way the guy drives from one hole to another hole. And I have to remind myself, it's not magical at all. It's the result of playing golf from the time he was two years old. His father put him, he started training him from the time he was two years old. And he's been, he has hit more strokes, he has hit more shots than his competent, than the one who is competing against him. The same thing with Kobe Bryant, the same thing with, name the person you watch. Zach Hirosano recently died, the tabla player. Like any so-called talented person who is top of their job, top of their profession and who the world thinks is doing magic, it's not magic. It's sweat. It is sweat. This is something that people forget. people come to me and they say, you know, I don't like this job that I'm doing. It's okay. So what do you want to do? No, I want to give it up. I want to give it up. Okay, sure. Give it up. But do me a favor. Go to Walmart and buy yourself a plastic bowl. Why? Because then it will be useful when you have to stand on the street corner to beg. Plastic bowl is useful to have, you know, you can stick it out like that and people can throw money into it. Because if you are going to leave a job that you're doing which is paying you money and you don't have another one lined up, a better one lined up, then you are looking at standing on the street corner. Is that what you want to do with your life? And because I don't like it, wake up, wake up, smell the coffee. You don't have to like the job. You do the job so that you can do something which you actually like. If you can find a job that you also like, fantastic, brilliant. I was personally, I was able to do that practically all my life. But not everybody can do it. People do jobs to put bread on the table. People do jobs to pay their bills. People do jobs to send their children to school. They don't necessarily like the job, but they do it so that lives are built. And they take satisfaction from the fact that I'm sending my children to good schools. I'm able to afford a standard of living for my family. Yeah, so I'm doi

https://youtu.be/_ba2G380D70 Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honorable prophets and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and upon his family and companions. Peace and blessings be upon him. I'm sitting under this tree and I'm literally within maybe 10 feet of these beautiful amazing birds. The Sandhill cranes, absolutely incredible. And it's a pair with two youngsters. The male is standing there on top, as you can see. He's the guardian, the custodian, the sentinel. And he doesn't see any danger from me, so he doesn't give any alarm call. And he hasn't, he says, there is no danger from me. And this is the one in front here. This is one of the juveniles behind him or her. I don't know how to distinguish. It's the mother and behind that is the other juvenile. Absolute privilege, Subhanallah. I thank Allah Subhanallah for granting me this privilege of being in such close quarters with these birds. My brothers and sisters, one of the big things to teach our children is the value of community, the value of togetherness. And that begins in the home, in the nursery, in the family. As many of you know, and those who don't know, you will know now that I consult with business families. Family business consulting is my specialty. I have a book on it called The Business of Family Business. And one of the things I see that I see with business families, and I am very sorry when I see it. But I wish I didn't have to see it, is internecine conflict, conflict between brothers, conflict with the father. I know a case in which where the sons filed a suit against the mother. Inna lillahi wa nna lillahi wa rajim. The mother of our two Muslim teaches us that under her feet is Jannah. And imagine a son filed a suit case against the mother. Over what? Not over that piece of Jannah under her feet, but for some, you know, father's property, a father passed away, a father's property, a piece of the business, and so on. Many times people come to me, wealthy people, all of these are wealthy people. Some of them are millionaires, some of them are billionaires. I have one client whose business is four billion dollars. So we're not talking about small money. We're talking about people who may Allah have mercy on them and us. Oh, all I can say is that they didn't raise their children right. And that's what I want to talk about now. How do you raise your children right? What is the meaning of raising them right? That is a squirrel. It's a peculiar squirrel to this place. It has this long tail and it has a black mark on its forehead. Anyway, let me stay with my cranes. So we don't bring them, we don't raise them right. And when I say we don't raise them right, the biggest mistake we do is we don't orient them towards their responsibility as community members. And as I said, that starts with the family. The community begins with the family. In Islam, the family is the fundamental foundational building block of the community. And that's why Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wasallam said that a Jannah is under the feet of the mother and the father is the door to Jannah. When one of them dies, he said that both the parents are the doors to Jannah and the father is the door to Jannah. And the Jannah under the mother's feet is Jannah for the person or the son and daughter. And he said that when one of the parents dies, one door to Jannah closes for you and the other parent dies, the other door for Jannah closes for you. So take care of your parents, value them, serve them, be good to them. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala went to the extent in the Quran of saying do not even say oof to them. Do not express any displeasure with them. It is your job to please them. It is not their job to please you. And this is where we get caught up in our own, in the problem that we create for ourselves. So sense of community. How do you teach that sense of community? One very simple way, which is this way simple, but it's very profound. And that is that in the nursery, and I'm sure every single one of us has seen this scenario playing out. In the nursery, one child gets a toy and the other child wants the toy mostly only because the other one has it. It's not that this child was genuinely interested in that toy, but you know, because the other one has it, I must have it. And the usual response of parents, especially wealthy parents is don't fight. I'll get you your own. I will get you your own. Now take that same child, fast forward 40 years and you have a case in court, brother against brother, sons against father, and so on. And guess where that case really began? In the nursery, when that son and that daughter and those sons were three years old, fou

https://youtu.be/hVMcHK4Zcig Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. Peace and blessings be upon the Prophet Muhammad and his family. And upon his family and his companions. Madhu, I've run the sisters. In my view, if there is one single differentiating factor which separates people who are free, not enslaved in their minds, from people who are enslaved, is to look at and see how they take care of their surroundings. Now, as you can see here, this is a development on a golf course, villas on a golf course. I challenge you to find one piece of plastic, one scrap of paper, one empty bottle, one anything that would qualify as trash, anywhere, near a house, away from a house, anywhere, on the golf course. You won't find a single thing. Even if this was to be said about one particular place, it would be remarkable enough, but this is the default. This is the default. Except in places where, and this is America, also in America where you have the poor, the homeless, refugees and so on. And the first thing that hits you is the filth, the garbage, all the trash around everywhere. Now, I'm not being critical of poor people. I've been poor myself. But I want to differentiate between having resources and taking care of yourself and your environment. The two do not go hand in hand because I know situations, in India, for example, where you go into a house of a person who is a, may not be a billionaire, but certainly a millionaire. And in India, millionaires have billionaire lifestyles. So you have this fantastic house. You have people who are all over, you know, doing wonderful things, living in beautiful lifestyles, fantastic houses, furnishings and whatnot. But clothes strewn everywhere, shoes everywhere, expensive stickers. You know, each one would be worth more than somebody's salary for a month or a year maybe, but just throttle. You get into one of their cars and it looks like a trash can on a wheel. In India, you go into somebody I've been in, somebody's people's houses, people who are not billionaires, but definitely millionaires. And in India, alhamdulillah, millionaires live the lifestyle of billionaires. You know, servants and this and that. But you go inside the house, it has, it's a beautiful mansion. Inside it has fancy furniture, expensive stuff. Some of them even have a kitchen to show and a kitchen in which actual cooking is done. So, as we say, in Urdu, we say, yes, it's okay, the teeth of the show are different, the teeth of the food are different. Which is not strictly true, but you know, so we have this Dikhanika Kitchen Egg or Khanika Kitchen Egg. Or the one in which food is cooked, the Dikhanika Kitchen, the one in which food is not cooked, it's only for show. We have the most fancy kitchen appliances and stoves and god knows what. Never touched. Absolutely pristine condition, but to show people. Allah have mercy on us. We've gotten used to this very, you know, lifestyles which are very destructive. So, anyway, to come back to my point. So we have people with all these resources, fancy places. We're talking about change in the mind, mental enslavement versus mental freedom, true freedom. So we have these people who are really mentally enslaved. So they are, they have the resources, but they don't take care of them. And to me, as I said, the biggest and best sign that somebody is free is that they take ownership of their lives. They don't live their lives as if it belongs to somebody else. Not my job. I don't need to take care of it. As I showed you, as you can see, as I'm walking here, place is taken care of. And obviously, some of it is taken care of because the development, the golf course does it. But the maintenance fee here is, it is roughly $500 per quarter, which means you're paying $2,000 per year. For your surroundings of your house to be maintained. So you may be doing some things yourself, as in by your own hand and some things you might be paying for, but people are paying for that. When you go for a walk, you see people walking their dogs. You see people walking their dogs. You will find people with those people with either carrying a plastic bag with something in it or they have plastic bags in their pockets. And in parks and so on, there are boxes, dispenser boxes, which are free. And there's a trash can under that dispenser box. All of these are meant to pick up the dog's, what they call dog eggs. So you know what it means, right? So when the dog does what a dog does, they just don't walk away. They pick it up and they don't just pick it up and throw it there. They pick it up. They take it with them and carry it to this bag. And they take it to a place where there is a disposal for it. And they dispose of it in that particular place. Signs that these are people who are free in the mind. They're not enslaved. They own. The

https://youtu.be/hVMcHK4Zcig Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honorable prophets and messengers, Muhammad and the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and his companions, peace and blessings be upon them. What is next? Brothers and sisters, I am here in Florida, standing by this lake, this pond, near the golf course, what we call a water hazard. And these are the American ibises, the American ibis. You see the long curved beak, see how they dig in the grass to eat. There is a, you can see one, they're all white and one colored one. That is a juvenile, it's a young one. And they feed him by the pond. Very pretty scenery, Alhamdulillah. On the pond, there are also ducks. Let's see if they come close. So, they are, they look like morgan serves of some kind, not sure what. The demand for myself and you is we're talking about things that we keep saying teach children, but I think it has to do much more with teaching ourselves. Because children are little monkeys. They imitate adults, they imitate their parents, they imitate other adults who they respect. They learn by taking their values from adults they respect. I think of myself, I think of my own childhood, that's exactly what I did and that's exactly what any child does. They take their values from the adults in their lives and that is the reason why it's also very important to ensure that your children don't lose out from the company of respectable and respect worthy adults in their lives. Make sure they are around good people. Because that's how they learn and depending on the kind of people they are with is what they will learn. So if they are around adults who are, who take pride from the pride in the disobedience of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, or who take their children to clubs and to partying and who teach their children, give them their first drink, Subhanallah, may Allah have mercy on us. These are statements I've heard from Muslims. My father gave me my first drink. My father took me to the race course. The first time my father got me membership in this gambling den, in this club, which of course obviously the club is created for clubbing, so it's created for the enjoyment of everything that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has disapproved of everything which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has prohibited. May Allah have mercy. So this is the danger. This is also how animals and birds learn from the company of elders. Here we have some more ibises and another youngster here, another juvenile one, which is flying off. I don't know why he is so skittish, but he is. The others are fine. Nobody bothers them here. The ducks people even feed, but these ibises, they are not fed. They don't need to be fed. If you notice the little black feather at the end of the tail, this is all the khudrat of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The attention to detail is incredible. Let me make this bigger so you can see them closer. So among the things to do with children is to keep them around respectable, respect worthy adults. That's the first thing. Second thing is to ensure that they are exposed to the right environment. And that environment for most of us is the environment of the masjid. So make sure that your children go to the masjid. Now, there is a tendency to say, children will say, oh, you know, there is nothing attractive there and I'm not attracted to the masjid. If your child makes that statement, consider that to be a statement which is where the child is admitting to having a major psychological, a major spiritual illness. Don't take that as a norm. The biggest problem is that parents take that as the norm and then they want the imam of the masjid or whoever is an authority in the masjid to say, well, do something to keep my child interested, do something to keep my child engaged. I am reminded of a true story of Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of Aligarh Muslim University. When he was trying to fundraise for the university and he was facing the usual difficulties that Muslims face when they want to fundraise for long term projects, especially to do with education. May Allah have mercy on us. We are good at funding emergencies. You know, something goes wrong and you ask Muslims for money, for help. Alhamdulillah, may Allah bless those who give it. People are happy to give help. We are good at fundraising for for masajid, right, to build a masjid. But if you say, well, fundraise for a project which will in the long term ensure that the emergency that happened, the blood and gore that happened, the orphans and widows who were created, who you are now trying to support, this will not happen. Where the problem will be dealt with, the problem will be solved. There will be no oppression. There will be no wars

https://youtu.be/SDIKN0xlpsg Auto-generated transcript: This is Leo, my brother's cat. He's a Russian blue and not the friendliest of cats but he seems to like me. For reasons unknown. What I want to say here today is the importance of differentiating between needs and wants. And this is something that starts very early in life, in the way we raise children, the difference between needs and wants. So anytime the child says, mommy, daddy, I really, really, really need this. Very common in American families, really, really, really need it. Three times really, really, really need it. Is to help them differentiate between is it something you really need or is it a want, a desire. Nothing wrong with wants except that if you do not differentiate between needs and wants, you end up with increasing your cost of living. And by cost of living, I don't just mean the amount in terms of dollars or cents or rupees or whatever. I mean the price you pay for that life quality. So if I need an iPhone 16, then I'm adding that into my cost of living. Because when you're saying need or want, it relates to happiness. What is it that makes you happy? So the more the need you have to make you happy, two things happen. One is your chances of being unhappy go up because what makes you happy is more and more and more. And if I can't get that, then I'm going to be unhappy. So my chances of being happy go down and my chances of being unhappy go up. The second issue of the difference between needs and wants is of course the actual dollar value. What does it cost? And once again, the more the needs, the more it's going to cost. I therefore want us to, I remind myself on you, let us recalibrate our lives and say what is it that I truly need? Now a need, a good way of understanding that is to use the Islamic and Arabic and Urdu concept of zarura. What is zarura? What is something a zarura or zaruri is something that is essential for survival. Where if you don't have that, then it is dangerous to life. It is going to cause dharar, which is ham. So dharuri is something which prevents harm. So what is dharuri in terms of food? Say for example, what is dharuri? Dharuri is the hadith of the Rasul of Allah, he said eat enough to keep your back straight. And if you must eat more, then eat up to one-third of the capacity of your belly. One-third food, one-third water, one-third empty air. And he said the hadith doesn't begin there, the hadith begins with, he said the worst utensil, the worst vessel to fill is the belly. So it begins with that. And then he says well eat only enough, a few morsels, a few morsels, not handfuls, morsels, to keep the back straight. So we can do our work, we can worship Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, we can go about our daily business and keep it free from and never fill the whole belly. Now if you look at this, the whole issue of saying I want a triple chocolate sundae, is it a need or a want? To say I want, I need this, I need that kind of food, I need Hyderabadi biryani, right? I need Bihari kaab, I need this and that, all our desires, they are desires. Now remember I'm not saying that it is haram to have a desire, no, if you want to eat a particular kind of food, haram to ila. But don't say it is a need. It's not about semantics, it's about the psychological effect of calling something a need. If you call the thing a need, then it becomes a need. It generates unhappiness because as I told you, a need is something which if you don't have, it causes you harm. I need to breathe properly, if I don't have that air I will die. I need a certain amount of food, if I don't have even that amount of food, which is frankly being one meal in 24 hours, is a need. So one meal in 24 hours if I don't have, then I'm likely to you know have low sugar and I'm likely to experience the harmful effects of that. So that's a need. But anything more than that is a want. It's a desire. Again, it's not haram, but if I convert it into a need, then it has the potential to create unhappiness. So always watch for that. What do I convert into my need? Go further and see, take a take a make a list of all the things that we have in our lives. And ask yourself, is this a need or is this a want? Ideally, reduce the number of wants. I'm not saying necessarily that if you have something give it away or sell it or something, no, if you do that, that's good for you. But even if you don't do that, it's okay. But take it out of that list of wants, list of needs. It's not a need. It's a want. Transportation is a need. A particular brand of car is a want. Food is a need. Particular kinds of food so many times a day are all wants. They are not needs. Shelter, a house is a need. But necessarily to own the house, even at the cost of the anger of Allah by taking an interest based loan, this is a want. It's not a nee

https://youtu.be/1hrPIMPrOp8 Auto-generated transcript: We are on 75 going from Fort Toddy to Tampa and on the right is the Evacuates National Park. And almost for probably 50-60 miles we had the channel which they have cut, repeat the road in the park. We saw alligators, we saw cosplays, we saw cowherds, greater or lesser egrets, all kinds of things. So the reason I'm saying all this is because on highways, on roads, I always remind myself, I knew that this is a tariq, this is the way. And there are things about this which parallel our lives completely. Now the way is leading to something. You don't just get onto the road and start driving. You go onto a road and you're driving to a destination. And so also in life you can just live or you can live with a purpose to get to a destination. You get on the road and when you want to get to a destination, nowadays it's very easy because of GPS and so on, but otherwise even otherwise you would look for the shortest way to get there, the fastest way to get there which might not be the shortest but which has less traffic or you might say I want to take a scenic route because I want to see some stuff on the way and so on and so forth. So the choice of your routing is also a conscious choice that you're making. So also in life when we want to live our life and we want to look at the pathways that we choose, that it makes sense to do that consciously and say what kind of life do I want? And I don't mean just for us just to say that you know janla, janla is yes, that is default inshallah and we hope so, but what will get me to janla? What is the best way of living by life in a way that I can get to janla? So that is the detail of it. Now for that imagine that you are on this bus and you have a driver who's an expert driver and who is one of the best routing heroes, so what to do? So you go to the driver and say when this is I'm getting on this bus, this is the bus taking me and you know I like to see something and so on and he says we have to ride, go ahead. Then what you concentrate on is the quality of your journey. You don't spend time or I would say even waste time in trying to make friends with the driver, in trying to have a social life with the driver, in trying to have you know interactions with the driver and stuff. That's not your problem, that's not your focus. Your focus is to get on the right bus, stay on the right bus, see the sites you need to see, learn what you need to learn. What I'm saying is that because today we live in a world where society has among the many ways in which society fools us, it fools us into what has been called the tyranny of feelings and the tyranny of feeling this works like this. It says that whatever I feel is supreme. This must take supersede, this must supersede and take precedence over everyone else's feelings. It doesn't matter what anyone else feels, what I feel must happen and it is the job of everyone else to modify their behavior in order to suit my feelings and if they are not doing that, they are the problem. This is how our society works which is why you have for example children going to school and teachers are taught that you must engage the children, the children must be engaged in your class, the children must find your class interesting, the children must find your class entertaining. Whether they're learning something or not is not top of the line. I don't say that's not important but that's not what they ask teachers. They ask them about how engaged are the children and so on meaning that if they are engaged enough, if they are entertained enough, if they're happy enough, they will automatically learn. Nothing can be further from the truth. The reality is that you go to a teacher like you go to an oncologist because you have cancer and because this oncologist only Allah can cure and give life but for the sake of my example, this oncologist knows what to do to cure your cancer. You don't go to the oncologist to make friends, you don't go to the oncologist to take your water data. You go to the oncologist because you need the oncologist otherwise you are dead. So if the oncologist tells you to stand on your head, you stand on your head. You do whatever the oncologist tells you to do no matter how painful it is, no matter how you dislike the oncologist's face, you go there because of his knowledge and because you know how this knowledge can help you. Believe me between you and me especially with regard to this, I have seen so many people lose the benefit of good teachers because I don't like the teacher. I had an interpersonal conflict with the teacher. Go ahead, don't like the teacher. It's your life. If you don't like the oncologist at most you will die but you will die anyway. Cancer or no cancer but you don't have to go to jahannam which you might end up doing if you do the s

Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honorable prophets and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, and upon his family and companions, who have accepted him many times. And what is next? Brothers and sisters, we have heard many people talk about the fact that the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, used to encourage the youth and he gave a lot of very serious responsibilities to young people. For example, we have the case of Usama bin Zayd al-Adha al-Anu, who was given command of the army, of a battalion which was going for a Ghazwa, and in that army were some very senior Sahaba. We have the example of Musa ibn Umayyad al-Raudilan, who the Prophet sent from Makkah to Madinah as his representative. And many of the great Sahaba, many of the great Ansari Sahaba of Madinah accepted Islam at the hands of Musa ibn Umayyad al-Raudilan, including Sa'ad bin Mu'adh al-Raudilan and Hussayb bin Hudayr al-Raudilan and others. Mu'adh bin Jawal al-Raudilan, another great Sahabi, who the Prophet sent as his governor and Qadi to Yemen. And we have the famous Hadith where the Prophet was holding the bridle of his horse and Mu'adh bin Jawal was holding the bridle of his horse. And Mu'adh bin Jawal was mounted on the horse and the Prophet led the horse out of Madinah. And he gave him advice. It's a lot of Hadiths, I won't mention it here. But he gave him advice, he asked him questions about how he will judge the basis of judgment from which we have our basis of our Sharia, which is the Kitab of Allah, the Sunnah of His Prophet, Ijma and Khayas. And there are others. But remember one thing, Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wasallam gave these enormous responsibilities to these young people, not because they were young. So understand that. We get sidetracked, we say, oh, youth, youth. Youth has nothing to do with it. It is the effort that those particular youths put into learning the Deen. And they came up to the standard of the Nabi alaihi salatu wasalam, so he chose them. He didn't just randomly pick anybody. He didn't say, okay, all 15 year olds come and stand here. No, he picked one person. That person happened to be 15, that person happened to be 17, that person happened to be 20, that is immaterial. So don't get your priorities upside down. He didn't pick any 20 year old. He didn't pick any 17 year old. He picked Musab bin Umayyad, Radhe-l Anu, because he was Musab bin Umayyad, not because he was 17. So what does it tell us? It tells us that unfortunately in our society, all that our education system has done, it has postponed childhood. It has postponed childhood. It has postponed maturity. So we have 20 years old and 23 years old and 25 years old and 26 years old are still staying at home and their mother makes parathas for them and they eat that paratha and the father pays all the bills and they think they are, oh, they are cat whiskers. Seriously, they have not seen one single day of hardship in their life. They are not sweated anywhere. If you put them in one place and there is no air conditioning, they will have a fit. They freak out. This is what our education system has done, created adults who think they are children. This we have to break out of because the laws of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's world don't change because we have a Sikh society which has an education system which does not educate. What are Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's laws? Allah's laws are those who make the effort, who learn, who take hardship will win. No matter which year, whether it is the 7th century, whether it is the 15th century, whether it is the 20th century, whether it is the 15th century or any century, this is the law of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, the one who makes the effort. Not your name, not your nasab, not your hasab, not your wealth, not your father's name, not how much money you have. How much effort do you put into whatever it is that you are doing? And therefore I advise myself and you, I am very happy to see a lot of young people in the masjid. Alhamdulillah, spend time in the masjid. Not just spend time as in sit around in the masjid. Do something. Learn. Take responsibility. I have a checklist. If you want to see whether you are capable of responsibility, whether you are fit to be considered an adult or not, I have a checklist. Let me tell you. And this is an American checklist. How many of you do the laundry in your house? Everybody's laundry. How many of you wash dishes? How many of you clean your house? How many of you take out the garbage? How many of you wash your father's cars? Alhamdulillah, you are a winner. But as one kid... How many of you sit and eat parathas? Still a winner. He deserves the paratha. Nothing wrong. Alhamdulillah, if your mother is cook

https://youtu.be/sOJilSFIJzk Auto-generated transcript: This is me in temperature is now minus 12 and it says minus 12 feels like minus 18 and I can tell you that's true. I am in this Martiniyu Park, it's a really beautiful place. As you can see here the river is also frozen. I will turn the orientation of the camera in a minute. The river is also frozen, the stream is frozen and it is very very cold. Alhamdulillah Allah SWT has continues to show the beauty of His creation in so many ways the whole time. My brothers and sisters, as I mentioned yesterday in the Khatira, the biggest trouble that the people of Mecca, the Mushrikin of Mecca and the Quraysh, the biggest trouble they had was with believing in the hereafter, believing in resurrection. For them to believe in Allah, they already believed in Allah as in their pantheon Allah was the supreme God and they said all the others are, they had different words which I don't want to use now but meaning that they interceded on their behalf with Allah and so on and so forth. So they were Mushriks, they were not people who denied the presence of Allah SWT. They were not atheists, they were Mushriks, they were polytheists. So that was not the issue, the issue was, Allah SWT said they say how is it possible that we, after we have died and we have become one with the soil, our bones are, bodies have disintegrated, they have decomposed, we have become one with the dust, that we will be created anew, that we will be recreated, resurrected, how is it possible? Allah says, Allah said definitely it will happen and you are denying the meeting with your Allah, meeting with Allah and Allah SWT then challenges and command and says, say you will die, have no doubt about this, you will die. Allah SWT says, and it is his job to extract your soul and bring you back to Allah SWT. I remind you of myself that this will happen. I don't think this is something that anybody denies, anyone, the most ignorant person, the most learned person, nobody denies death because every one of us has seen death. You have had, some of us have seen our closest and dearest ones dying in front of us, in front of our eyes, you have seen them passing away. I'm sure with some of us, they were so dear to us that if we had been given a choice, we would have gladly given our lives for them and say, Yallah, give my life to this person, let me die instead of them. Doesn't happen, does not happen and Allah SWT mentions all of these things so clearly and Allah SWT says in the Quran, Allah SWT says, Allah SWT says, when you cannot breathe, when you are having difficulty breathing, when you are going through Sakratul Mouth, I mean Allah SWT protect us from the pain of that and Allah SWT says, and you are standing there looking on, you are right there, you are not absent, you are present, you are looking on, but you can do nothing. Allah says, this is a challenge. Allah says, if you can bring that soul back, if you can ease their breathing, if you can bring them back alive, do it. See if you can do it. Allah says, Allah SWT says, we are closest to them, but we are not visible. We ask Allah SWT to make our lives easier, our death easy. As I'm talking to you, you see there on top, there is a red-tailed hawk which is sitting in that tree there. It's one of the predatory birds of this place. It's beautiful. Just thinking or talking about death, I'm thinking that that is malakul mouth for some rabbit or some unwary mouse or squirrel. The hawk is sitting there waiting for what Allah has decreed for it. The point I want to remind myself and you my present sister is that if one falls into a trap unknowingly, if something you didn't know and unknowingly there's a hole in the ground, you didn't realize it and you fell down, then okay, it's understandable. I mean you didn't know that. But knowingly if somebody falls into a trap, if knowingly somebody does something which he knows that it would be a tremendous loss, but he still does it, then what do you call that? And that's why sometimes people ask me, they say, what does it matter what I believe? They say, well, I don't believe in the akhirah. I don't believe there's a day of death, I don't believe that I will be called to account. This life is all there is and I have money and I have power and authority. You know, I have nice friends. So I'm doing something, you call it haram. I have a girlfriend, boyfriend. You say it is haram, so what? I have it, I'm doing it, you know. And if it's so bad, why doesn't punishment come? How come I'm not being punished? I find these, you know, I have all this, I mean, you know, so nothing happens to me. So I'll die, I become dust. Now I say to you, as far as I'm concerned, I believe in Allah and I believe in the last day and I believe in death. I believe that I will meet Allah and I want to live my life in a

https://youtu.be/5KnVlYA7TKE Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of the Universe. And peace and blessings be upon the Prophet Muhammad and the Messenger of Allah. And peace and blessings be upon the family of the Prophet Muhammad. Muneer and I have reached kind of halfway mark also in this trek around this beautiful lake. And we're having a discussion and talking about certainty. And I was saying to Muneer that just walk, take slowly, walk slow motion. Just see Muneer's steps. What is he doing? He's taking a step forward. Now, when you're taking a step forward, ask yourself, what am I doing? What you're doing and what anybody is doing is you are consciously taking a decision to upset your equilibrium. Because the safest position for a person is to stand squarely on his feet, the width of his shoulders, his feet apart, the width of his shoulders and stay there. Don't move. That is the safest position. But if you take that safe position, then you are not going anywhere. You're going to be standing in one place until you drop dead. So that safe position is safe, but it's not of any use to anybody. So what do we do? We consciously lean forward. Just walk and see. You can practice this yourself. When you're walking, what are you doing? You're consciously leaning forward, knowing that you will fall, knowing that there is a chance of you falling. And then automatically, it has become automatic. When you were a little kid, one year old, one and a half years old, it was not automatic. You had to do it. You did it consciously. But automatically, your leg comes forward and stops you from falling. That is called the process of walking, to consciously choose to lose your equilibrium. Put yourself in danger of falling and then move the other leg to stop yourself from falling. If by some chance, your other leg gets caught in the carpet or somebody trips you or something, you will fall. You will actually fall flat on your face, right? But you walk because that is the only way that we can get ahead. Nobody says, be safe, don't walk. No, you have to walk. So we were talking about the attitude that we have to learning Islam. And I am talking about people like me and people like probably most of you who are listening to this podcast, people who have been born Muslims. In my family, I know that my ancestors have been Muslims practically from day one. From my mother's side, they came from Madinah and from the time of the Vizier Salaam. So they have been Muslims for 14 plus centuries. On my father's side, they came from Central Asia. So they were probably Muslims from maybe what, a thousand years or something like that, 1200 years. So Muslims for generation after generation after generation. We never saw anything else. We never saw anything other than Islam. We never saw our parents, grandparents, whoever worshipping anyone. Now that's a good side of it. But the problem side of it is that therefore we don't have enough value for Islam that Allah Almighty is going to give us. And by enough value I mean that we think it just, it's like the air you breathe or the culture or the mother tongue we speak or something, it just happens. And it's okay if I, you know, don't know all the ins and outs of the culture, it doesn't matter and so forth. So we don't take trouble to learn. One of the simple things that we were talking about is that we see in our mothers are here, children of the Afghan refugees who are here, small children, we're talking about little children who are, you know, seven years old or something. Those kids, they read Quran much better than the children of the Arabs. Even though the children of the Arabs are listening to, hearing Arabic all the time, their parents, grandparents all speak Arabic, they have Arabic channels running on the TVs and everything else. But they have not learned to read Arabic. Nobody taught them, they just send them to the school. Alhamdulillah there is a school, Alhamdulillah there is somebody to teach them here. But if that hadn't been there, they would just not know. And I know this for a fact because I know and I have, I know people and I have met people who were in their 30s and 40s, 50s even, who could not read the Quran. Just Nazir, I'm not even talking about reading it, understanding the meaning and what, just Nazir, Alif Lamim, they don't know how to read that. They don't know the letters. And it is not surprising, it's not a question of saying, how is it you are an Arab but you don't know. Learning doesn't come by osmosis, learning doesn't come through the air. A person who studies knows, if a person doesn't study, he doesn't know. So that's why we have people who are old enough but they have no knowledge. Now, Maudid Alhamdulillah is studying

https://youtu.be/KMz56W8C_lQ Auto-generated transcript: As you can see, it's all completely frozen. We had a bit of a snowstorm, not too much of it, but there was some snow last night. So, Munir, show your face. That is Munir. So, it's got snow on top. I don't think it is frozen solid, but don't ask me to prove it. These are the magnitudes, northern hemisphere, where in the winter it completely dies and things are, you know, as if there is no life. And then Allah's to continue to show us His signs and to help us to see His signs. The thing is not just about seeing because as I say all the time, seeing is different from looking. Good morning. Seeing is looking different from looking. Looking is a function of the eyes, whereas seeing is with the heart and with the knowledge. Because when you say I have seen, it means that you have recognized the reality of what you've seen. So, I remind myself to see, not just to look. And when I see this, the sight of snow covering the land is so beautiful. Looks so absolutely pure, everything. Reminds me of Allah SWT as a satar, the one who covers the faults of His slaves. And Imam Shafir Ahmdul Alayh said, if somebody praises you, don't take it to heart. Don't start believing it because the person is praising the satari of Allah. He's praising the cloak that Allah SWT placed over you. The people cannot see what's under the cloak. And when I see these scenes, this absolutely beautiful scenery, I'm reminded of that. Yes, it is very beautiful. Looks so peaceful, harmonious, smooth, level. No dips in it, no bumps in it, no holes in it for anyone to fall into and so on. But it's far from reality. If you walk across that field, then you really know the depth of the snow, you know what's under it and so on. From the… with this phone, it's not so easy to see just now, but it's… there is water there, which is, you know, not yet melted. So, Alhamdulillah, that water is not yet frozen. First, water is not yet frozen. On top here is… it's frozen. In this ice and snow, one of the most important things to make absolutely sure is that it can be frozen. And it's not frozen. It's not frozen. One of the most important things to make absolutely sure is that it can take your weight, because if you fall into a lake, which is… because the snow will not enough take your weight, then it's almost sure death with hypothermia and with drowning, because it's… it's not the same as swimming in warm water. So, talking about this… Oh, there is a flock of… There's some birds coming this way, I think. No, they're going the other way. There is a hawk flying on top. That's why they took off the birds. And they're coming this way. They… They are… Oh, they seem to be terns. Yes, they seem to be terns. Probably see them closer up. And the hawk came up, so they… And this is also the signs for us to see and think. No, these are girls. These are girls of some kind, small girls. And… He showed us this, you know, that… Anas Mahantara teaches us through his creation, through his Kuruvata. And one of the things we learn is that the thing that animals do is they don't take chances. As soon as they sense possible danger, they don't even know whether it's dangerous or not. In this particular case, I don't think that hawk was any danger to them. But as soon as they sense possible danger, they take evasive action. They fly away, they seek shelter. If it's a… If it's a narrow-rided, seek shelter, if it's a bird, fly away. Which tells us to think about what do we do when we sense danger. But the problem is that we have got used to a lifestyle where we have got used to the fact that we have got used to a lifestyle where we have got used to danger, not in any sense of being capable of handling it, but we have got used to not getting alarmed and not panicking when we really should be panicking. The… The example I gave the other day, I was reading somewhere, the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Russia. So when the fire happened in Chernobyl in the nuclear reactor, firefighters went in there obviously. So people rushed in there to put it out to do whatever they could do. And they did whatever they could do and then they came away. And then over the months and years, they realized that they had been massively radiated. It resulted in almost certain deaths. For them, it resulted in cancer, it resulted in all kinds of, you know, bad ending, bad and painful endings for them. Now, that radiation when it was happening to them was… they couldn't feel it because you can't feel radiation. They didn't… they were not going around with tickers which were blaring or something, nothing. I mean, they didn't know it was happening. But it happened. So the message for us is that just because we don't know something is happening, it does not mean it's not hap

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon the most honored of the prophets and messengers. All praise be to the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him and upon his family and companions, who have been very, very obedient. What is next? Brothers and sisters, Allah SWT told us in the Quran, in Surah Al-Isra, Allah is describing the situation and the condition on the day when we will meet Allah. And Allah is saying, Allah is not saying, No, Read your book. Read your book. This book is enough on this day as a witness, as a hesaab, as an account-taker for you. What is that book? Allah SWT said in Surah Al-Kahf, People will say this. What kind of book is this? Nothing is missing. Everything is there. It doesn't matter if you read it or not. It doesn't matter if you read it or not. Your book is a witness, you read it and you know it. What is this book? The Quran. The Quran is not a book. It is a book that you can read and you can read. Kabira, everything is there from the smallest thing to the biggest thing. What book is this? This book is the book of our life. Who is the author of that book? The author of the book of Abu Sarmad is Abu Sarvad. The author of the book is Abu Muqbil is Abu Muqbil. The author of the book of Abu Muqbil is Abu Muqbil. We are the authors of our own books. And that is why we will never be able to deny anything in that book because we wrote it. If Abu Sarmad writes something about me, I can say, you know, I'm sorry, you were mistaken. Maybe you are my enemy. But I'm writing about myself. I always remind myself and I remind you, in today's world, remember these ayat came in the 7th century. Truly Iman bil Ghaib was for the Sahaba. For us, Allah has made many of the things which were in the Ghaib for the Sahaba. Allah has given us the Mushahad of that. Allah has shown us those things. I remember seeing a documentary of this person who takes two phones. One phone switches off completely, totally off. And the other phone is on. He puts both the phones in his pocket and he drives around Washington from this point to that point to that point to that point. So, multiple points, 20, 30 points. And he comes back and then they go into the telephone company records and they find that the phone which was turned on tracked all the places that the person went to. He didn't use the phone anywhere. He just went there. The phone has the tracking of that, but very interestingly, even the phone that was switched off has tracked everything. So what is so difficult to believe that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala knows simultaneously what we are doing? If you go mentally, for example, into say Verizon, you know, at the data center of Verizon or any of the, you know, great telephone companies, for example, right? And if you could be sitting there, what would you see? You would see multiple conversations happening between people in multiple languages, in multiple locations in the world. Some of those conversations between two people who are stationary, so that means somebody is in a house or office, something in America, the other person is also stationary in his house, office, whatever it is in India. But many conversations happening between people who are in cars or who are, God knows, in planes, and they are flying, which means that their location is every instant the location is changing, yet the line does not break, the call doesn't drop, they have a conversation. And in theory, every single conversation can be recorded, yes? Every single one of them. There's no such thing as an unrecordable piece of public communication. If you don't want the communication to be recorded, don't say it, period. If you are going to say it, if you are going to send it on an email, if you are going to send it on a chat message, if you are going to send it on a phone, believe me, it is recordable. I'm not saying everything is actually recorded, maybe, may not be, but if somebody wants to record it, it is recordable. The reason I'm saying that is, so therefore, what is so difficult to believe that Allah I mean, we are the creatures of Allah, and the phone and the technology and so on is our creature, because we created it with the help that Allah gave us. If the creature can do something, the creator can do it. Yet we live our lives the way we live our lives. May Allah have mercy on us. I remind myself and you that a time will come when the door, one door will open and another door will shut. The door of the Akhira will open and the door of Tawbah will shut. Because Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said, a person's Tawbah is accepted until the gargara, until the breath comes in the throat. Because when the breath comes in the throat, it means the person is seeing Malakum Bhaut. That door is open now. The door to the Akhira is

Auto-generated transcript:Surah Al-A'raf Al-Rayyib Alhamdulillah Al-Rumbal Alameen Salat wa Salamu ala sharafeel anbiya wal mursaleen Muhammadur Rasoolulahi Sallallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wa sayyiduhu sallam tasleeman kathiran kathiran On the subject of repentance, Istighfar and Tawbah These are first of all two separate words Istighfar is to seek repentance, is to apologize, is to be sorry, express our regret, be contrite and Tawbah is to turn towards, to turn towards Allah swt So when we say Istighfar and Tawbah the understanding is that if you say any one of them alone the other one is automatically meant So if somebody says make Istighfar to Allah swt, that automatically means that also turn towards Allah And if somebody says make Tawbah it means make Istighfar But in terms of sequence Istighfar comes before Tawbah So we regret what we have done and then we change Our ulama have said that it is necessary to repent for every sin Alhamdulillah we know that Allah swt forgives minor sins Even when a person has not consciously made Tawbah, consciously made Istighfar For example when we make Udu, minor sins are forgiven between two Farsabad Minor sins are forgiven between two Umrahs, between two Jumas and so forth Minor sins are forgiven Alhamdulillah and we thank Allah swt for this But it is not for the slave to imagine and say that this is a minor sin I don't have to seek forgiveness That would be arrogance, that would immediately make, saying that itself would make that, that would be a very major sin That is the sin of arrogance which Mela Marsi has, you know it is one of the things which are, unless Allah wishes to do that It is something which is not forgiven, so therefore it is the position of the slave Position of Abu Dhiyya, of the bondage to Allah swt that we repent from every sin If the offence involves the rights of Allah, not a human, then there are three conditions to be met In order that repentance is accepted by Allah swt The first one is to stop from committing the sin, the first thing to do is to stop doing it Very very important, if I say that I am, that something is wrong, then stop doing wrong For example, from the Hukuk Allah, the first and most important for the person who has taken Shahadah For the person who has entered Islam is to pray on time So if I am not praying or I am not praying on time, if I am being lazy about it and so on, so immediately stop doing that Second one is to stop, is to feel sorry for committing it, so in the heart And Allah knows what is in the heart, so genuine regret, genuine, be genuinely contrite, genuine regret for what we have done And the third one is a strong commitment, never to do it again, never to commit this sin again With strong resolve, this is I will never do it again Now if the repentance does not meet any of these three conditions, then it would not be a sound repentance In addition to that, what Sayyidina Ali, Radhe-i-Lahore and others have recommended is that you also give some charity So every time we make this istighfar, then give some charity as a sign of our sincerity If the sin involves a human's right, which is from the Hukukul Ibad And remember this is, human is whether Muslim or not, doesn't matter If you have violated anybody's right, then it is that person's right that it should be repaired So if the sin involves the human's right, somebody's right has been violated, it requires a fourth condition So the three conditions to stop doing it, to feel sorry for it and never to do it again, these three are there In addition to that, to absolve oneself from such a right, which is if it's a property, he should return it to a rightful owner If it is slandering or backbiting, one should go and ask the person the pardon and the forgiveness of the person who one spoke against Who was, you know, who backbitten and so forth So making amends, this is very important The Sahaba asked the Vishwasala, they said if we have done something like this and the person has died and we don't know where to find them Or something, he said, then give a lot of sadaqah on their behalf and keep seeking forgiveness of Allah SWT for them and for yourself So one should also repent from all sins If he repents from some, his repentance would still be sound according to the people of knowledge, however he should repent from the rest Scriptural proofs from the kitab and sunnah and the consensus of scholars, this is very very important to understand For example, Allah SWT warned us and he told us Allah SWT said turn towards Allah SWT all of you believers All the believers, those who are believers, includes men, includes women So that you might be successful In another place, Allah said O anistaghfiru rabbakum summa tubu ilayh Allah said and turn in istighfar towards Allah SWT, seek repentance, seek his forgiveness and turn towards Allah So this is where as I said, also in another place Allah SWT mentioned this in the Quran,

Auto-generated transcript:Arabic My brothers and sisters, this issue of Tawbah and Istifar is so important. You know the Hadith of Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wasallam in Musnad ibn Ahmad where Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wasallam said that when a person makes Tawbah and Istifar continuously, when a person does a lot of it, then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala extracts him, solves his problems for him, extracts him from his difficulties. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala solves that person's problems for him and provides him from sources that the person cannot imagine. Now just think about this that our whole life is spent in this world and may Allah have mercy on us, we get worried about this and that and we have this problem and that problem. Alhamdulillah, most of us have problems which later on when you think about them after that time has passed, you know you want to laugh at the things that you used to worry about. Of course I'm not saying that everybody is in the same place, there are people today in the world who are facing difficulties which are literally unprecedented, not in living memory, Mala'a alam. In history of course human beings and human history is full of misery and suffering so there is no shortage of incidents in history but at least in living memory. For example what's happening in Palestine now is something which is absolutely unprecedented. We never saw this before, we never thought we would see it and may Allah have mercy on the people and may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala forgive us. But the cure for that, the solution for difficulties, the solution to get out of difficulties is istighfaratowa. It is to seek repentance, it is to ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to forgive us. And that's the hadith in Musnad ibn Mahfati, the person who frequently seeks forgiveness. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala extracts him from his difficulties, removes his difficulties, solves his problems and provides him from sources that he could not imagine. And this hadith is the literally the tafsir of the ayat of surah talaq where Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says that a person who was taqwa, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will remove his difficulties, will solve his problems and he will provide him from sources that he could not imagine. Now who is a Muttakhi? A Muttakhi is a person who considers Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala jallaatilalahu and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's position and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's pleasure as the sole object of his deeds, the sole criterion for all his decision making. Surely when we think about this, see how simple life becomes because if we have just one criterion for all decisions, will Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala be pleased or not? That's all. Now if we have this criterion for all decisions then we cannot possibly go wrong because if you are doing something which pleases Allah then automatically it means that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will make things easy and the world also will be pleased with us. Uhura al-Abdullahi anhu in the hadith in Muslim Sharif narrated from Rasulullah who said he who repents before the sun rises from the west Allah will forgive him. Now this means that when a person commits a sin he goes away from Allah, tauba means to return to Allah, to return to Allah from the sins. When he repents he returns to Allah and desires to be pardoned by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and to get close to Allah. This returning is tauba and when it is said that Allah turns towards him it means that Allah accepts his repentance. When our Prophet says before the sun rises from the west he means before the person dies because that is the as far as we are concerned this is the uh you know we will die before the sun actually comes out from the west. Another hadith in Thirmidhi, Abdullah Umar ibn Al-Khattab he reported that Rasulullah said Allah accepts a slave's repentance as long as the slave is not on his deathbed that is before the soul of the dying person reaches his throat. The word gargala is is used in the hadith which means when there is a grasping sound in the throat as the soul is about to leave the body the soul leaves the throat so which means that by then the person has started suffering the agony of sakarat. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala protect us from this. The ghayb has become open he has seen Malapur both at that time the doors of Istafar are closed from that at that time a person cannot make cannot repent and the person depends that he meant that repentance is it's too late. So therefore it is a person must therefore seek the forgiveness of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala before that time so it's very very important. Finally the mature very famous story in Bukhari and Muslim that Nabi Sayyid al-Hodori said reported by Abu Sayyid al-Hodori who said that Rasul Rasul Allah said there was a man from among the nation before you who killed 99 people and then made an inquiry abo

Auto-generated transcript:This is a new kind of Fajr reminder that I want to share with you which is really sharing stuff from my own life which I hope will be enjoyable as well as a means of learning inshallah. On October 20, 2010, we are now in 2024, on October 20, 2010 I was 55. So I published a book on that day called 2010-2010-55 because that's how we write dates in India and everywhere in the world except the US. So in the US we write the day first and then the month. In the US we do it the other way which is the month first and the day afterwards. So this is written in the English or the Indian way if you like. 2010-2010-55 which was 55, the book contained 55 life lessons that I learned in my life. So let me share some of these with you. Those who read the book, please forgive me or read the book, please forgive me and those who are motivated to read the book and get it on Amazon. Those who would like to learn more about my life, there's another book of mine called It's My Life which is for the princely sum of $7. I'm most grateful to Allah that He gave me the life that He gave me for only $7. Alhamdulillah, wajib. So as I told you I turned 55 on the 20th of October 2010 and that's the title of this book 2010-2010-55. I reflected on the lessons that I learned in my life which I think has been, alhamdulillah, an unusually rich and active and exciting life lived in India, in Guyana, in America, in Saudi Arabia and in travels in other parts of the world. I wrote this book as a tribute of thanks to all those who added value to me and taught me formally and informally and invested in my learning. During my childhood and teens in India through the 60s and 70s, I spent all my vacations walking in the jungles of the Sahyadri mountains in Adilabad district in Telangana living with my dear friend and mentor, Uncle Rama, Venkat Rama Reddy Sahib. Imagine the excitement of a 15-year-old with a .22 rifle or a 12-bore shotgun walking with one goan companion, Shivaya, all over the jungle bordering the Karnab river, just Shivaya and myself. At times, Shivaya and I would walk in the night to witness a sambar mud bath and sit behind a tree quietly watching majestic sambar stags roll in mud and then stand up to shake off the excess, coated in an arm of mud which when dry protects them from biting insects. Sometimes we would hear the call of the tiger as it set out for work. I learned to read tracks which tell the story of all those who passed that way. I learned the meaning of smells which tell their own stories and sometimes can mean the difference between life and death. But the biggest lesson I learned was to take life seriously while having fun and to extract every drop of learning. In the late 70s and early 80s, I spent five years in the Amazonian rainforest of Guyana bordering the river Burbys. I went there when I was 19 or 20 and lived alone in Kokwani on the river Burbys. During weekends, my friend Peter Ramsey and I would take our boat on a trip 50 to 60 miles, sometimes 100 miles upriver and camp on the bank or on a sandbank in the river. And sleep in hammocks. It was our code of honor to not take any food on these trips and live off the land from our hunting and fishing. As an emergency fallback, we would take some raw chicken guts in a plastic bag. If we didn't manage to catch any lukanani or to shoot any agouti or kanji pheasants, we would trawl the chicken guts in Burbys and sure enough we would get a bite. Piranha. Great eating as long as you know how to keep clear of the teeth and retrieve your hook. I would say alligator eyes shining like diamonds sprinkled on the dark waters during our night patrols to check our fishing nets. During one trip, Peter and I accidentally caught a 22-foot anaconda in our fishing net. It was so heavy that both of us couldn't lift him clear off the ground. I met people who lived 30 to 40 miles up the Burbys River in houses on stilts in small forest clearings where they grow a few vegetables, hunt and fish for their meat, and don't come to town for months at a time. No water except the river, no light except the sun and the moon. Sometimes it's a single family of Amerillians, sometimes it's a couple of families who live by one another. Their children play in the forest and swim naked in the river. Yet I never heard of a case of piranha bite. Never figured out that one as the river is infested with piranha and they love to bite. Why that didn't happen with these people I don't know. These families always grow the best honey which they would sell to people like me who turned up on their doorstep or to take to town and exchange for a couple of bottles of country liquor. Deadly stuff in more ways than one. I spent 10 years in the 80s and 90s in the rainforests of the western ghats in the Annabales in India. And further south planting tea, coffee, cardamom and rubber. I spent many hours tramping up and down hills and valle

⚠️ Auto-generated transcript: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alameen. Wasalaatuhu wa Salamu ala sharafil anbiya'i wa al-mursaleen. Muhammadun Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi wa ala alihi wa as-sallam, tasliman kateeran kateeraan. Fumma badhu. My brothers and sisters, in today's world it is very easy to get distracted and to start believing things about yourself which have no grounding and no roots in reality. For example, you might feel that you are extremely popular and very influential and that you are a great strategic leader and all kinds of things that I hear people saying about themselves or other people saying about them. May Allah have mercy on us and teach us to remain grounded in reality. And that's why I always quote and remember one of the wise sayings of Imam Shafi'i Rahmatul Ali. He said that when somebody praises you, remember that he is praising the cloak that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala covered you with. He does not know you. He has not seen you. You are real you. He has not seen your reality. He is reacting to or responding to what he is seeing and what he is seeing is the cloak that Allah has covered you with. Meaning Allah has covered your weaknesses, Allah has covered your evil with his cloak and therefore the person thinks very highly of you. Don't start believing that. Just thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala as alhamdulillah and ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala never to remove that cloak so that if it is, so that if people see your actual reality then that landing can be very rough. So it is very important on having said that, it's important for us to remain grounded as I said and let me therefore teach you some ways of how to remain grounded. So whatever you are, however high you might be flying, ask yourself some questions, some very simple questions and the first of that question is, no matter who you think listens to you, no matter who comes to you for advice, ask the question, are they willing to pay you for that advice? And what's the evidence? It's not a question of just saying I'm willing to pay. Have they paid? Can you look at and can you show for yourself? I don't say show me, you don't need to show me but do you have invoices and bills to show that people come to you for advice and that they are willing to pay you good money for that advice, number one. Number two, how many people follow your advice? Who follows your advice? Have you tracked anybody to see that you gave some advice and the person followed that advice and then what happened to them? After all our advice is not coming from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, nobody is receiving wahi. So no matter what, no matter how good you think your advice is, it's a good idea to track it to see what happened to the person who was wise enough or foolish enough to follow your advice. Now today we are conditioned and we measure success on the basis of false numbers, followers of social media. There's a joke somebody sent me once and they said that this guy died and there were three people in his funeral and his mother said, oh, how is this possible? Because he had 3,000 followers on Facebook. Now that is the unfortunate reality. The whole reality is that we live in a make-believe world and we measure our success and we feel good on the basis of these false numbers. We think people are listening to us. It's a mutual, you scratch my back, I scratch yours kind of thing. So if one is it's of course also promoted by the algorithm, whatever you like, you see more of that. And secondly, if you like something, somebody's comment, then that person likes your comment and so on, actually has no meaning. So therefore false numbers. Now just analyze that on the basis of engagement and the number will get reduced to single digits. For example, if you are looking at the number of views on your channel, you might have 10,000 views. But then look at the engagement for example, if you had a 30-minute lecture, how many people listen to that lecture for 30 minutes? Because as far as the algorithm is concerned, as far as the machine is concerned, as long as a person clicks on that link, even if they were there for one second, it will still count it as one view. But if you are talking about something and it took you, that lecture was half an hour, how many people stayed for half an hour? And literally it will get reduced, your number will get reduced to single digits. As I said, social media caters to the LCD, the lowest common denominator of humanity. People without focus, without goals, with the attention spans of monkeys who cannot concentrate on anything, who have no staying power, who are looking for constant external stimulation to which they react exactly as their handlers want them to. Having a large number of them as followers means that what you are creating pleases them. Now what does that tell you about how you are spending your time? B

⚠️ Auto-generated transcript: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alamin wa Salat wa Salamu ala ashrafil abyi'i wal Mursaleem, Muhammadur Rasulullah Sallallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallam, tasleeman kaseeran kaseeran. My brothers and sisters, the part of our aqeedah, our creed, that the Makkans, the Quraish and the other people of Makkah, they had the most trouble with was the idea of resurrection. That after you die, you will be resurrected and called before Allah. Allah Almighty had mentioned this, wa qalu a'idha dalalna fil ardi inna fi khalqin jadeed and then Allah said bal hum biliqa'i rabi'im kafiruhu. Allah said they say that how is it possible after we die and we become one with the earth, we disintegrate, we decompose, are we going to be resurrected again, brought back alive again and Allah is responding to that and saying bal hum biliqa'i rabi'im kafiruhu. Yes indeed that will happen and you are making kufr against your ab. You are denying the meeting with your ab. And then Allah declared and said qul yatawafakum malakul mawti'l ladhi wukil abikum thumma ila rabikum turja'u. Allah said say to them, you will die. There is no doubt about this. You will die. Qul yatawafakum. And malakul mawti'l has been set upon you to take your soul and bring you to your ab. I remind myself and you that this problem of yakhin, I am not talking about intellectual understanding, I am not talking about you know just drift service and yakhin is in the belly, deep down. The problem of this yakhin, may Allah have mercy on us, continues to this day with us. Ilah masha'Allah whoever Allah has given the yakhin, may Allah give them istighmat. But others, this is the problem. Do we truly believe in, that's why we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves do I really believe that I will stand before Allah? Do I really believe that? And if the answer is yes, then what in my life, what in my actions, what in my speech, what in my decisions is evidence of this, is proof of this. Because Allah swt is not going to be satisfied with our, in any case all this yakhitiyaq is only for this dunya, all these nice words and so on. In the khabar there is no yakhitiyaq. Allah says very clearly, this will be sealed. Hands will speak, feet will speak, eyes will speak, ears will speak, the skin will speak. In another place Allah swt mentioned that the people will question their own skin, how is it that you are speaking? How is it you are bearing witness against me and the skin, the body will say, Allah swt gave me the power to speak. And this is one of the many reasons for us to deeply and sincerely study our akhita, our creed. What do you believe? What do you believe? What do I believe? What keeps me in that belief? What takes me out of that belief? For example, today somebody sent me a video, I won't mention the name because as long as the man is alive we have hope for his hidaya. But one of our very famous, he called himself a lapsed Muslim. So I have to use that word. Lapsed Muslim film actors, very famous in India, a Muslim guy with a Muslim name. He says, and he said it in Urdu which is even more important, even more, doesn't sound nice, I will not repeat the Urdu but I will translate it into English. He says, you know I always find it very strange that Allah is sitting on top there and looking at everybody, what is he doing, what is he doing, he is taking notes. He must be very busy. Inna li la hi unna al raju. Allah revealed the Quran and said that to joke, not even believing it, just joking about Allah and about Rasulullah, Allah said, qad kafartun baada imaniku. Allah said you have left the faith after you had brought faith. Joking about Allah and about Rasulullah and about Allah means about the Zat of Allah, about the promises of Allah. All of this makes, takes us out of Islam, it is as serious as that. Today we live in a world and we live in a society where everything is a joke. Everything is a joke. In this society, supposed to be a Christian country, people make jokes about Isa A.S. or Jesus. They make jokes about Musa A.S., Moses. Not us, we cannot do that. We cannot even make jokes about Isa and Musa. We cannot make jokes about Muhammad Rasulullah and anybody who jokes about Allah and his promises, any of these things, exit from Islam. So seriously, do you have yaqeen in the akhirah? I'll give you a test, a musk that my sheikh used to tell us. He would say Allah had said he will seal the lips and the hand will talk and the feet will talk and so on. So he would say look at your right hand. Look at your right hand and imagine this right hand is speaking. What is it saying? He used to make the right notes. So look at your right hand, imagine this, because there is no imagination. This you are imagining today. That day it will happen. So this right hand is going to speak. Now what is this right hand saying about you? Abou

⚠️ Auto-generated transcript: We are speaking about the importance of feeling grateful and expressing gratitude to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and to those people through whom Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala's blessings reach us. We spoke about worldly blessings for which we must express our gratitude to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and to those people who were instrumental in our receiving them. Now let's see what Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala said about the reward in the Akhira. Al-Bukhari Muslim narrated from Ibn Abbas Wadiyyul Anuwa that Rasulullah said relating from his Rabb Jalla Jalaluhu, Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala decreed good deeds and bad deeds. Then he explained that whoever thinks of doing a good deed and does not do it, whoever thinks of doing a good deed but does not do it, Allah will write it down as one complete good deed. He only thought of that. He didn't do it yet. Allah will write it down. If he thinks of doing a good deed and then does it, Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala will write it down between ten and seven hundred fold or many more. If he thinks of doing a bad deed then he does not do it. Allah will write it down as a complete good deed. And if he thinks of it and then he does it, then Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala will write it down as one bad deed. Again from Al-Bukhari Muslim, also narrated from Abu Hurairah radiya'l Anhu that Rasulullah s.a.w. said, Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala will forgive my Ummah for whatever crosses their minds so long as they don't act upon it or speak about it. Imran Rajab Ramatullahi said that these texts refer to four matters. The recording of good deeds and bad deeds and thinking of good deeds and bad deeds. Then he said out of these, the third matter which is thinking of good deeds, it is recorded as one complete good deed even if he does not do it. As it says in the hadith of Ibn Abbas radiya'l Anhu and elsewhere. In the hadith of Huraym bin Fatih radiya'l Anhu, it says if a person thinks of doing a good deed but then does not do it and Allah knows that he thought of it and was keen to do it, he records for him one good deed. And this is in Musnad imam Ahmad. This indicates that whatever is meant by thinking of here is the actual conscious thought and determination and resolve that are present when one is keen to do an action, not merely a passing thought that is not accompanied by any resolve or determination. Abu Dardar al-Ansari wa Dall'anhu says that if a person goes to bed intending again with the clear resolve to pray during the night, which is qiyam, which is tahajjud and then sleep overtakes him until morning comes, then what he intended to do will be recorded for him as if he has done it. It's narrated that Sayyid bin Musayyib radiya'l Anhu, he said if a person thinks of fasting, praying, going for ayat or umrah and so on, but he is prevented from doing that, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will grant him the reward of what he intended. If the intention is accompanied by words or effort, the reward is ensured and the one who intended it is like the one who does it. As Abu Khafshah al-Dall'anhu narrated that Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said, people in this world are of four types, a person to whom Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala grants wealth and knowledge, so he fears his Rabb with regards to it, upholds his ties of kinship with it and acknowledges the rights of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala concerning it. He is of the highest talent, so he has wealth, he has knowledge and he uses his wealth according to the knowledge of Islam in the right places, that is the highest status. The second is a person to whom Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala grants knowledge but he does not grant him wealth, so he is sincere in his intention and he says, if I had wealth, I would do the same as the other one, as what so and so does and of course Allah knows the truthfulness of that. If that is true, then he will be rewarded according to his intention and the reward will be the same. The third type is a person to whom Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala grants wealth but he does not grant him knowledge, so he squanders his wealth without knowledge, he does not fear his Rabb concerning it, he does not uphold ties of kinship and he does not acknowledge the rights of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala concerning it, he is the worst status. So he has wealth and he misuses this wealth. The fourth type is a person to whom Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala does not give wealth or knowledge, so he says, if I had wealth, I would do the same as so and so, that is like the first one, he will be rewarded according to his intention and their burden of sin will be the same. Meaning depending on the intention, if he intended good, then he will get that, if he intended evil, he will get that. The phrase that the reward will be the same obviously means that they are equal regarding the basic reward for the actions but n

⚠️ Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful. All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds. My dear respected brothers, sisters, elders, I thought today it's a good idea to look at the, what I like to call the other side of the picture. We live in a world today where thanks to what news is presented and how it is presented, we have a very dark and dismal and depressing picture of our life and times. And that is because only bad news sells. And in a profit-driven world, ruled by predatory capitalist barons, nothing which doesn't make money can survive. For example, the root cause of our environmental crisis is that when net worth is measured only in dollars, then wood has value, not a standing forest. So felling of forest makes profit, but left untouched, it represents what we call unexploited opportunity. Having said that, let us see what the reality of our world is, really, by comparing it with what it was 50 years ago. That is within my lifetime. I'm not talking about ancient history. Take infant mortality, malnutrition, treatment for heart disease. Running hot and cold water in the bathrooms when you turn on your shower. Elevators, refrigerators, televisions, is that a blessing or not? Telephones and a thousand other conveniences that we take for granted were either not there or were in a very nascent stage, which you can only see in a museum today. My father, Rahmatul Ali, before the age of 40, had three heart attacks. And the only treatment was to take rest and not eat oily foods and not eat too much meat and so on. That's it. Because angioplasty and bypass surgery had not been invented until then. Neither had cataract surgery. In my city in Hyderabad, one of our nobles, Fakhrul Mughal Bahadur, built a palace in 1870. It stands today, which has 600 rooms. 150 of them were furnished with Louis XVI furniture from France. Today, the cost of Louis XVI chairs ranges from $2,400 to $24,000 per chair. Now, I'm not saying that Fakhrul Mughal paid that price, but obviously he still paid a fortune. But that's not the point of my story. My point of my story is to ask you to think about this. When you are standing in your shower with hot water raining down on your head, adjust it to just the right temperature and reflect on the fact that this wonderful palace didn't have a shower with running hot and cold water. It also didn't have flushed toilets. It also doesn't have air conditioning, which in the summer in Hyderabad where the temperature goes to 120 degrees is useful. Remember that money was not the issue. The technology didn't exist. Now, go further back in history and look at all the great monarchs and their palaces and the luxury they lived in and so on. And you will realize that some of the most common essential conveniences that we are used to and we believe we can't do without them were not available to people who ruled entire nations. My question is, are we conscious of this and do we thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for it? Gratitude is the platform on which happiness runs. We all want to be happy, but how many of us are consciously grateful? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala began his book with reminding us to be grateful. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen. All praise and all thanks is to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, the creator, protector, sustainer of the universe. Rabbil Alameen. We read this ayah in every rakat of every salawat. Do we contemplate on it? Do we reflect on it? And do we count the number of things that we need to thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for? So let's start doing that right now. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Allah said, which means, and He, jalla jalaluhu, has granted you all that you asked Him for. If you try to count, just count, we're not talking about being grateful and expressing grateful, just count. If you try to count Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's blessings, you will never be able to number them. Indeed, humankind is truly zalumun kafaa, truly unfair and truly ungrateful. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to save us from being in that list. And then Allah said in the same surah, surah Ibrahim, Allah said, which means, and when your Rabb proclaimed, if you are grateful, I will certainly give you more, I will increase my blessing. But if you are ungrateful, surely my punishment is severe. I advise myself and you to make a list of the top ten things that we should thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for and do that in tahajjud, in sujood. And do this every day and see how your life gets transformed. See how your heart will be full of happiness. Expressing gratitude to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is also to express it to those people in our life who Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala sent his blessings through. Parents and siblings and children and spouses and teachers and friends and grandchildren, many more. Do w

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. I am doing a series of these reminders on different topics and I have done one on the topic of knowing Allah SWT, our approach to the Quran and the next one on the Seerah of Rasulullah SAW. Today I want to talk about another thing which is we are talking about monitoring our level of knowledge and understanding. And the question I want to ask myself and you is what do we know about the Akhira? What do we know about the Akhira? If you think about it, the only thing which is certain, the only thing which is absolutely certain for which in which there is no doubt, that is our death and the Akhira, what happens thereafter. Everything else in life is a matter of doubt, we don't know. If a child is born you don't know how long it will live, if I am alive I don't know how long I will, how many years, months, weeks, ten seconds, whatever I have. I don't know whether I will be healthy or sick, I don't know whether I will be wealthy or poor, I don't know if I will be powerful or powerless, educated or uneducated. I don't know anything about myself with certainty. I know some things but I can't be absolutely certain. A simple thing like, just think about this, a simple thing like do I know whether I will wake up tomorrow morning? No, I know this is, you know, it sounds like a dumb question, it's not, it's very real question because we know this, we can think about it, but is it something that hits us in the heart? Do really believe this? I do not know whether I will wake up tomorrow morning. Now if I concentrate on this question and I really feel it, how will my life change from this minute onwards? Because if I say like I maybe I will not wake up tomorrow morning which means that from now, now is what, 8 o'clock, 8 p.m., what is morning? Even if you take it at 6 a.m., so I've got roughly not even 12 hours, 10 hours. So what do I want to do in that 10 hours? 10 hours is a lot of time. 10 hours is a lot of time if I use it in the right place, in the right way, right? 10 hours, a lot of time. But that 10 hours will pass like that. All I need to do is open my Instagram or something and 10 hours is gone. I turn on the TV and it's gone, right? So what is my knowledge of the Akhira? Somebody asked what is one of the Shri Yuga, he said how can I get concentration in Salah? Right? I think this is a question we all have, how can I get concentration in Salah? He gave such a simple, beautiful answer, try it. He said when you stand for Salah before you say Allahu Akbar, the few seconds, right? When you stand for Salah, you don't just walk in and say Allahu Akbar, you come and stand for Salah and then maybe you are reading, you are saying Inni Wajah, Wajah, and so on and so on. But he said before you say Allahu Akbar, that few seconds, remind yourself that I will die and when I die, I will be called before Allah and Allah will call me by name and I will stand before Allah. And the first question that Allah will ask me is what is the state of your Salah? That is what I'm doing here, I'm standing in Salah. He said start with this. Before you say Allahu Akbar, bring this thought consciously into your mind that this is what is going to happen before Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. I will be called and I will be asked what was the state of your Salah? What am I going to answer? So the question to ask ourselves is, what do I know about my Akhira? What do I know about the questions that I will be asked in my qamar? What do I know about the questions that I will be asked on the Day of Judgment where Rasul Rasulullah hadith he said the feet of Bani Adam, the feet of Bani Adam, the children of Adam Ali As Salaam will not move from before their Rabb until they answer four questions. What do I know what is questions? I've written a book, the book is called Questions but what will we answer? Read the book. Questions but what will we answer? I may have also run a series of classes on this, I'm not sure but, Balaam alaam. Questions but what will be answered? We need to know because every single one of us will be asked these questions. There is no doubt about this because this is what Rasulullah has informed us. It's not a matter of doubt. So what do I know about my, what do I know about the Akhira? And final question to ask ourselves which is something a very very dear friend of mine once years ago, I was talking to him about the Akhira and so on and he said something amazing. He said to me, he told me uncle Yawar you know, this thing is not even on my list. I take the list of goals, what I want to achieve in life. He said this Akhira, Jannah is not even on my list. So forget about it, is it in the top three, top ten, top ten thousand? He said it is not even there on my list. And the man is not an atheist, he is a mashaAllah person, a good Muslim who prays five times a da

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. Bismillah al-nāzir r-raīm. Al-hamdu li-llāhi rabbil-ālamīn wa-s-salātu wa-s-salām �ruffī l-abiyā'ī wa-l-mūt salīd. Muhammad was-sūr allāhi ṣallallahu ʿalayhi wa-alā ʿāli wa-s-salām, tasliwun kateerun kateerun. The second thing in this context of focusing on ourselves is to ask this question and say, What do I know about the life of Rasul allāhu ṣallá Llāh? Now, this is an extremely important thing to do, which is, may Allah have mercy on us, which is usually ignored. And I don't say that it's ignored deliberately, because inshallah that is not true. The Muslims love Rasul allāhu ṣallá Llāh, but it is just ignored because of lack of understanding of the importance of learning about the Seerah. The Seerah of Rasul allāhu ṣallá Llāh is the living Qur'an, is the manifestation of the Qur'an in real life. It is the living tafsir of the Qur'an. And I'm not saying this out of my love for him. This is what Sayyidah Aisha Siddiquar of the Al-Anha said, this is the answer she gave somebody who asked her and said, Can you tell us something about the life of Rasul allāhu ṣallá Llāh? She said, Don't you read the Qur'an? He said, Yes, I read the Qur'an. He said that was his life. He was the living Qur'an. Now, what do we know about that? What do we know about his life? That is why this is another marker. One marker I said yesterday, which is, How much Qur'an do I know? The second marker is, What do I know and how much do I know about the life of Rasul allāhu ṣallá Llāh? Once again, like I mentioned, the method of doing it with the Qur'an al-Tarīb is ask yourself, What do I know now? And then start reading. And then test yourself after a month, two months, three months, six months, one year, What do I know, which is more than what I started with. There is no shortage of material. Alhamdulillah, there are many, many books and videos and so forth about the Seerah. For those who read Urdu, the very best is Seeratul Nabi by Sayyid Suleyman Nadiq. Alhamdulillah, which is the best in Urdu because it is also the best because the way that Seerah has been written and the stories of the Seerah, they have followed a very strict code of reference as they do for hadith. So the rigor of the research, the rigor of the program of how they did that, this is as strict as they do for hadith. So therefore it's a very authentic mashaAllah, very, very beautiful book. So those who read in Urdu, there is an English translation of that as well. So you could try that. Otherwise, there are many others. For beginners, there is this very famous book called The Life of Muhammad S.A.W. from the earliest sources by Martin Lings, L-I-N-G-S. MashaAllah, he was a great Muslim scholar and he wrote this book, very simple, very easily readable. So there is in Arabic and then English translation also of that, which is Ar-Rahiqul Maqtum, the secret nectar, Ar-Rahiqul Maqtum by Shaykh Mubarak Puri. So there are many books of Seerah. So please make sure that you read. You must know about The Life of Rasulullah S.A.W. and it must be very familiar to us. It doesn't need to be humming and hoeing and searching for answers if somebody asks a question. So you must know this. And the purpose both of reading the Koran and reading the Seerah of Rasulullah S.A.W. is to practice that in our lives. This is very critical, very important to practice in our lives. How can we practice the Seerah in our lives? How can we practice the Koran in our lives? Because we will not be asked, what did you know? We will be asked, what did you do? We will not be asked, what did you know? We will be asked, what did you do? And therefore, whatever we know must be translated into action. And that's our responsibility. So make sure that we do that. Pick one thing at a time. As I said earlier as well, the power of metrics. Pick one thing at a time, then monitor that and say, how am I doing it? For example, how do I deal with anger? We know how Rasulullah S.A.W. dealt with anger. He didn't do this temper, he didn't curse anybody. You know, he didn't drive a rant. You could see the effect of anger on him. So you can't say he never felt anger. Of course he felt anger. Anger is a human emotion like anything else. And he was a human being, so he felt anger. Question is, what did he do with it? So if somebody says don't get angry, that's impossible not to get angry. And also depending on what you're getting angry about, getting angry is a sign that you have intelligence, that you are a person of principle. You should get angry. In certain cases, if you are not getting angry, something is wrong with you. The question is what do you do with that anger? Do you express it in a dysfunctional, in a destructive way or do you express it in a functional and constructive way? And that's what the Viceroy S.A.W. alwa

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honorable prophets and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and upon his family and upon his companions. Amma Badu, one of my very dear friends, my brother Anil, who sent me some really good stuff. May Allah bless him. He sent me something from one of the saints of Sheikh Muhammad Ghalib, who said, do not busy yourself with following people's private matters. Or seeking to know their personal affairs. It may be that due to this, you will be trialed, you will be tested with turning away from rectifying your own state of affairs and your uprightness about Islam and your worship of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And by Allah, what a tremendous loss that would be. Because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Ya ayyuha alladheera amanoo qu anfusakoon ba ahlikoon naarah wa quduhan naasoo wal hijaroo. O you who believe, protect yourselves and your families from a fire whose fuel is men and stones. Today, the people of the world are suffering. Today, the whole purpose of social media is to do the opposite. It's to get us involved in everyone else's affairs. And invite others to be involved in our affairs by sharing with them things which are personal and there is either no benefit in sharing them or there is actual harm in sharing them. So we share them. We talk about our successes and we don't know that there are people out there who when they see you succeed, they become jealous and they wish ill for you. You talk about something that you enjoy. You talk about something that makes you happy. And you don't realize that there are people out there who don't like to see you happy. And some of those people can be quite close to you. That is why silence is such a huge benefit. Because the word that does not leave your mouth cannot cause any harm. In the Khatta of Radha Lano, he said, I have regretted my speech many times, but I have never regretted my silence. Now this does not mean being silent about things where you should speak out, like for example against injustice. That is something that you should not be silent about. That is something that you should not be silent about. You should speak out about that. But being silent about other things which are personal and which really should not be in the public space. So what must you do? Focus on yourself. And focus on yourself by doing two things. One, by setting goals. And second, by having benchmarks. Who do you compare against? So first and foremost, learn about Allah. The way to learn about Allah is to read His Kalam, the Quran Al-Karim. Make it your daily practice. You read at least one Juz every day. One Sipara every day. So that way every month you complete one Quran. And then in Ramadan, you do your one Juz plus you pray Taraweeh. And in the Taraweeh in most places the Quran Al-Karim is completed. So that means you would have completed 13 times the Quran Al-Karim in one year. And if Allah gives you Tawfiq, do more. But at least minimum 13 times the Quran Al-Karim would have been completed if you follow this method. One Juz every day. The best way to do that is to wake up, say an hour, hour and a half before the time for Fajr starts. And pray the Hajj Juz and after that read Quran until the time for Fajr. And so then you can easily finish one Juz and then go to the Masjid for Salatul Fajr. So learn about Allah SWT by reading the Quran. Then memorize the Quran. Do whatever you do. Right? One Ayah more today. Each day one Ayah, two Ayahs, three Ayahs. Memorize Quran. Ask yourself, how much Quran do I know? How much do I know? Some people know, you can say I know one Juz, two Juz, three Juz, ten Juz. Others may not know an entire Juz, but they may know different Suras. And if you add up, add all of them up, that may be equal to one or two Juz or more. Whatever it is, so how much do I know? And then compare and say, how much did I know last year? How much more this year? You know, there's something that I... May Allah SWT give me the tofeeq to follow what I preach also. And the same thing to all of us, which is that what you don't measure, you don't know. What you don't know, you cannot change. You cannot improve. So measurement is critical to all improvement. So ask yourself, how much Quran do I know now? And then measure yourself one month later. How much more did I learn? Next month, how much more did I learn? And so on for the year. How much more did I learn in this year? And make the year to memorize the entire Quran because we know there are hadiths of memorization, one of the most beautiful of them is that Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, on the Day of Judgment, Allah will call the people of the Quran, the people who have memorized the Quran, who know th

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. My brothers and sisters, sometimes the thought comes, some people ask this question, which is that what does it matter what I believe? Does it matter what I believe? The answer to that question is first of all asking another question, matter to whom? So if I say does it matter what I believe? The answer is, we begin with another question, which is matter to whom? What you believe, does it matter to me? No. Does it matter to anyone on the face of the earth? No. Then who does it matter to? It matters to you. It matters to you. What I believe matters to me. What you believe matters to you. And in the end, that is the only thing which counts because we are going to stand before Allah completely and totally alone. Nobody else will stand with us. Nobody. My very good friend, Rafib Baig, from India, he sent me this wonderful reminder, which is Farid versus Tahajjud. And I'm just reading what he sent me to share it with you all. It says, do you know the difference between Farid and Tahajjud prayer? Farid prayer calls, which is the other, are given in a human voice by the Muadhin, while Tahajjud's call is given by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Himself. Second, the call for Farid prayer is heard by all human beings, while the call for Tahajjud is heard and felt by a few selected ones. The call for Farid prayer comes, it says, come for prayer, while the call for Tahajjud says, is there any seeker I will give? Hal min sa'ileen fa'atui. Is there any seeker I will give? Most Muslims, many Muslims pray the obligatory Farid prayer, but Tahajjud is performed and prayed only by a selected few who Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala chooses and blesses. In Farsala, there is the possibility of Riyadh, which is showing up, which means that it may not be purely for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala with Ikhlas, but Tahajjud is prayed alone and quietly. Only Allah knows. In Farsala, there is a greater possibility of distraction of mind and thought and heart, as one frees himself from business of dunya to come to the prayer, while in Tahajjud, one is away from the routine tensions of dunya anyway and is only thinking of the akhirah. In Farsala, one may think of meeting someone in the masjid and so on, but in Tahajjud, it's about meeting and talking only to Allah, where you can tell Him all your problems and ask for His mercy. Lastly, Tahajjud is purely a special tawfiq from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, from whom He wants to listen and likes their crying and likes their asking of Him. And it ends with saying glad tidings for those who have this invitation every night. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make us among those who pray Tahajjud as if it is fard, every single night. It's something which I have said again and again. Alhamdulillah, may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make me among those who practice what we preach and may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make us those who worship Him, only and only for His sake. Therefore, what I began this with, which is as far as we are concerned, do we what we believe? It doesn't matter. Now, I gave you the example of Tahajjud because it links with that. Only the one who believes will pray and only the one who believes truly and sincerely will wake up in the night in Tahajjud and he will pray Tahajjud. And that is why Rasul Muhammad SAW said Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala loves the man who wakes up for Tahajjud and wakes up his wife. And he says Allah loves the woman who wakes up for Tahajjud and she wakes up her husband. And he said that if the person being woken up, the wife of the husband, if they are not getting up, he should sprinkle a little water on their face, which shows the importance of the Ibadah because after all, it is not a farad Ibadah. So why is Rasul SAW saying wake them up and sprinkle water on their face? It's because it is a sign of love that you want for somebody else something which you love for yourself. This is the other surface of Rasul SAW also that your Ibadah is not complete until you want for your brother what you want for yourself. And which is even more to be understood with respect to our spouses, our children, our parents because they take precedence over anybody we may, anyone else that we may love. They take precedence over them. So therefore, if you are saying that I love my parents and I I love my spouse, I love my wife, my husband, I love my killer, then the sign of that love is that you should want for them the best of what you want for yourself. It's like saying for example, you know in the Covid days, I'm giving you that example. Supposing somebody had this absolutely sure 100% cure for Covid, they prove it. I'm not talking about all the stuff that we used to hear, drink this, drink that, you know, bang pots and pans and light candles and all kinds of stuff. I'm talking about actual real, you know, medically prov

https://youtu.be/WWVxwb5wCdg ⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alameen. Wasalaatu wasalaamu ala isharafil amliyai wal mursaleen Muhammad wa Rasululahi sallallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallamu wa tashreeen wa an kaseeran wa kaseeran wa badhu. My brothers and sisters, you can see here the temperature right now is about minus six Celsius. I am in Mitinigyu Park on my walk and you can see the beautiful patterns of the ice that is covered this stream. The stream flows through the park and goes out and eventually reaches the Connecticut rivers. But you can see this amazing, fantastic patterns of the ice and how the ice crystals form and all that has to do with the differential temperature of the water. First of all, the whole stream doesn't freeze solid. What actually happens is that the water right on the top which is in contact with the cold air freezes first. And when the ice forms of a particular thickness, then below that the water doesn't freeze so it continues to flow. So that's one of the interesting things about water, apart from many other interesting things. So now that Allah SWT said, Allah SWT said, Allah SWT said, So in one case Allah SWT said that you cannot count the blessings of Allah SWT no matter how hard you try. Even beings are, they are jalim and they deny to their transgressors in their deniers of the mercy of Allah. And in the other case Allah SWT said, That you cannot count the blessings of Allah SWT. There are so many but Allah is the most forgiving, the most merciful. So Allah is saying effectively that even though sadly the nature of a human being is such and we ask Allah to change our nature and to make us on those who are the Shakiri and those who are grateful to Him. Despite this and despite the fact that Allah has blessed us and we do not count those blessings. We cannot even count the blessings so obviously we do not express gratitude for them because the idea of the blessings of Allah and the idea of being aware of them is not simply to count them, keep a list. But to thank Allah SWT for everyone, You gave me this, you gave me this, you gave me this and making shukar of Allah, Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. We don't do that but Allah SWT said despite that Allah is the most forgiving, the most merciful. I always remind myself of the beautiful hadith of Rasulullah SAW who said that if a man wakes up, if a person wakes up, secure in his property, meaning that he has a house to live in, he has a roof over his head, secure in his property, secure in his health, his body works and he has enough food for the day, enough food for the day, enough food for the day, enough food for the day. If a man wakes up in that man, meaning man or woman wakes up in that state, then Rasulullah SAW said it is as if the entire world and everything in it has been gathered for him. Right? How can he want anything more than that? Now imagine, this is the level of gratitude that we are expected to have, that if we have, if we are secure in our dwellings, secure in our homes and we have our health is fine, Alhamdulillah, and we have enough food to eat, then what's there to complain about? Rasulullah SAW is saying it's as if the whole world and everything in it has been collected for you. SubhanAllah, may Allah grant us the ability to constantly and constantly and constantly thank him and for those who thank Allah SWT, I say, Allah SWT has announced, Allah SWT has announced, Allah has declared that the one who is grateful to Allah, the one who expresses gratitude to Allah SWT, that Allah SWT will increase him in goodness, will increase the blessings on him, on this person, and the one who is ungrateful, Allah SWT said let him beware of the punishment of Allah. So we ask Allah SWT to keep us always, always, always among those who are grateful and never be ungrateful. So anytime there is a word of or a thought of complaint, anytime, and usually, you know, it's, may Allah have mercy on us, if for us it is like a, like a Takhiya Kalam almost, that every sentence has to begin with that, with a word of complaint. Say, how are you? Ah, I'm okay. You know, my groan, oh, I'm okay. What happened to you? You know, your back is broken, your leg is broken. What, what's, why are you groaning? What's the problem? Suha Allah, I mean really, ask yourself this question, right? How's the weather? It's always something is wrong with the weather, right? It's too hot, it's too cold, it's too this, it's too rainy, it's too dry. It's never perfect. So wallahi, that's why I come out in this cold, just to remind myself that Suha Allah, I'm standing here in this forest. It is completely, except for these coniferous trees and even these look like they have taken a beating because the temperature last night was minus 10. And here it goes to mi

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. My brothers and sisters, in any business, when you do the accounting for your business, there is a basic fundamental document which many of you are probably using. If you are not using, you should use it. And we call that the P and L account, profit and loss account, P and L account. Ideally this is a document, it's a calculation which is done at the end of each day. So today's sale is so much. In this sale I made this much profit and this much loss. And of course it is done for your quarterly reviews, it is done for your annual tax calculation or whatever. P and L account. This P and L account is probably the most critical document or measurement which will tell you the health of a business. So if I was buying a business I would say show me your P and L account. And then I will have an idea of whether this business is how it's doing. Is it healthy, sick or not? The reason I'm saying this is because this is exactly how our life also works. Whether we calculate it or not, at the end of the day the angels which are sitting here, the Kiram and Kathibin, they calculate a P and L account, a profit and loss account. Profit from here, loss from here, their account. And when we meet Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, when we go into our graves and when we are before Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala on the day of judgment, there will be our P and L account, profit and loss. So one thing I advise you and I advise myself, let us do our own accounting before the accounting is done for us because it will be done one day. As I said earlier, the Raja Rana said, make your hisaab before your hisaab is made. Do your own hisaab, do your own accounting before it is done for you. So sometimes when I teach the leadership course, I teach five-day residential program called Leadership Excellence Course. We begin with this. The first thing I tell people is, hmm, you give them a sheet of paper or draw a line down the middle, on the left, right, loss and profit and I tell them now write down according to you, in your memory think about it and say what will you put in the profit column, what will you put in the loss column, what will you put. So in the profit column will go everything which is for which we ask Allah for a reward. So all your ibadah, all acts of worship, all acts of charity, kindness, birra lalideen, being good to your parents, right, good to the neighbors, whatever. Everything which is good, which you expect Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, you ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for reward to reward you. So salaah, saham, zakat, hajj, umrah, tilatul huran, zikrullah, salaah al nabi, everything. And on the last side are all the sins. So what did we do? Did we lie, did we cheat, did we not pray when we should have prayed, did we not give zakat when we needed to give zakat, did you greeba, namima, you know, backbiting, slander and so on and so on, whatever we do. Well have mercy on us. And then you total up and see how it looks. Does it look good or does it look bad because even if you cancel one against the other, what is left? In that process also remember that both for the good and the bad, there are deeds which are individual for which you get a reward. For example we prayed salaat al risha, alhamdulillah we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for reward for salaat al risha, this is that. There are other deeds for which you get reward not only for that deed but in the future it will earn for you. But again in financial language we call earning assets. So there are dead assets and there are earning assets. If I buy a bar of gold for $300,000, this bar of gold is worth $300,000, it sits there and some price fluctuation and so on, it will retain its value but other than that it doesn't earn anything specifically. But I take the same $300,000 and I put it into a commercial building, then it's earning for me the building value going up and down that's one but also every month I'm getting rent. So I have a rental income from this. So that $300,000 which if I put in a gold bar compared to I put it into a commercial building or a housing or something or land, this is earning me revenue because it is earning me rental value, so earning assets. So similarly in our good deeds, we pray salat al isha, alhamdulillah, we get reward, we ask Allah for reward. But supposing I teach how to pray to somebody who does not know how to pray, same salat al isha, same salat al isha but I see a brother of mine maybe he's a new revert or something or you don't have to do a revert, many Muslims, alhamdulillah, we just do something, we don't learn. So teach somebody to pray. Now what happens? Now what happens is that for every salah that he does, you get reward because Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said whoever teaches something good, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will continue to reward him as long as that

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. Alhamdulillah, O Lord of the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon the honor of the prophets and messengers, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and upon his family, and he is the one who is most at peace. What is next? My dear respected brothers, sisters, elders, Alhamdulillah, O Lord of the worlds, we are witnessing history in progress. I have already done that and I do it again on my behalf and on the behalf of all of you to congratulate our brothers and sisters in Syria for gaining their freedom. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala granted it to them. And we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to protect them and to protect all Muslims wherever they are. When we read the accounts of what has happened in Syria in the last few days, we can say that we were witness to that. Some of us can say that about the fall of USSR. I don't know how many of the younger people here even know the full form of what USSR was, but it was a global force to be reckoned with. And the fall of the monarchy in Iran, I was witness to the coronation ceremony of Shah Raza Shah Pahlavi. And more recently, what happened in Egypt and Iraq and other places. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told us about the way the world works and to look beyond the obvious. When we see events unfolding where those who thought they were impervious and immune suddenly had to run for their lives and seek refuge and all their wealth and power couldn't save them, we must thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for his mercy and grace in delivering those who were suffering under these tyrants. Imagine all the power to do good and to help people and to create a beautiful country and to leave a legacy of honor that their wealth and their power offered them. Instead they did what they did. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala warned us and Allah said Come, tarakoo min jannaati wa a'iyoon wa zuroo'in wa maqaamin kareem wa ni'matin kano feeha fakihin kathalika wa awrathnaaha qawman aakhareen fa ma bakat alayhim fa ma bakat alayhim al-samaa wa al-ardhu wa ma kano munzareen Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said which means imagine how many gardens and springs and it refers to all the accoutrements and the signs of luxury that the tyrants left behind as well as crops and splendid palaces and residences and luxuries which they fully enjoyed. And then so it was. Allah's haqqum came to be. And Allah says we awarded it to all, we awarded all of that to another people. And neither heaven nor earth wept over them, nor was their fate delayed. But I want to say also that given the recent history of regime changes, I hope the Syrian people that they should beware and not just focus on the toppling of statues because in previous events when people were occupied in celebrating in the streets, their destiny was being sold without their knowledge. More importantly, we need to ask ourselves what can we learn, all of us, from these events to correct our ways. And for this we have the Kalan of Allah, the Quran al-Kareem and the Sunnah of Muhammad Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. I remind myself and you that we see with our knowledge. We see with our knowledge. Where we see a beauty, where we see beauty in a building, Al Hamra for example, beautiful palace, an architect sees how Al Hamra is constructed, the entire palace, everything is constructed on one very simple mathematical principle. And that is taking the hypotenuse of the square, which is the diagonal distance between the two opposite corners of a square, and taking it in a protractor and moving it to the right and creating a rectangle because that becomes a little bit longer, the hypotenuse is longer than the side, so creating a rectangle on that and taking the hypotenuse of the rectangle and again circling to the right and creating a taller rectangle. The entire palace is built on a very simple, beautiful mathematical principle. So for an architect or a mathematician who understands that, the Al Hamra palace is of course something of beauty, but it is also a marvel of the application, the actual application of mathematics in architecture. The eyes of the mathematician and the architect are the same like you and my eyes, but they see because of their knowledge and they see more than we can see. And the same thing, apply this to any person of knowledge, to physicians, to artists, to whoever, they see with their knowledge. Where we see rulers and empires rise and fall, a historian will see the material and political reasons for it. Whereas a person of real insight sees the hand of Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, behind the events. I remind myself, I knew that the Akkal, the brain, the intellect, is not a source of information. It's not a source of knowledge. This is the big, you know, shaitani mumakkal or shaitani trap and deception that shai

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. My brothers and sisters, Alhamdulillah Allah SWT told us and gave us the formula of success in life. In Surah Al Nahal, Allah SWT said, Man amila saalihan min dhakarin aw unsaa wahuwa mu'minun. So two conditions. Man amila saalihan, the one who does good deeds, min dhakarin aw unsaa from the men or the women, wahuwa mu'min. And who is also a believer. So two simultaneous conditions. You must do good and you must also believe in Allah SWT. Because both are possible. It is possible that you, some people are, they claim to be Muslim, but then they do all kinds of stuff they should not do. On the other hand, there are people who do a lot of good. And we see a lot of people like this in this country. May Allah grant them all hidayah inshaAllah. But who are not Muslim, who do not believe in Allah SWT. So two conditions. Man amila saalihan min dhakarin aw unsaa wahuwa mu'minun. falanuhiyanahu hayatan tayyibatan walanajiyanahum ajrahum bi ahsani ma kanu yaamaloon. I see the generosity of Allah SWT. The one who does good deeds and is a mu'min. Allah SWT is saying two things. Allah says the first thing is, Allah says we will give them hayatan tayyiba. We will give them a beautiful existence, a beautiful life. Free from troubles, free from disease, free from calamities, free from you know, disobedient children, free from all kinds of things, right? All forms of stresses, all forms of hardships, free, pure life. Hula baraka khair, izza, people respect you, they honor you. Whatever you can imagine as good, Allah says we will give you this. And then Allah SWT says, this is the generosity of Allah SWT. Only Allah can be this generous. Allah says, walanajiyanahum bi ahsani ma kanu yaamaloon. Allah said and we will reward them in accordance with the best of their deeds, right? Best of their deeds. For example, now the great Salah tul Isha. We ask Allah SWT to accept it. We ask Allah SWT to reward us for it. But if you ask me, Sheik, what is the quality of your Salah tul Isha? How much reward do you think Allah will give you? What will I say? Right? So similarly, Salah tul Fajr, what was the quality of my Salah tul Fajr? Can I say Allah has accepted? No. But maybe in my whole lifespan or whatever lifespan Allah gives me, there will be one deed which Allah accepted. Maybe one Hajj, maybe one Omrah, maybe one small piece of charity I give somebody. Allah Allah. Which Allah accepted. That acceptance is huge, right? Allah says I will reward them according to that for all their deeds. Can you imagine? So I've got supposing, you know, you think of it like in a shop, your stock, right? So everything in the shop has some value. So there is something for one dollar, something for ten dollars, something for fifty dollars or a hundred dollars, so on and so on. And then you have this fantastic solitaire, you know, Koh-i-Noor or you've got this Jacob diamond or something, which is worth ten million dollars. Allah is saying I will reward you for everything including that one dollar topi for ten million. Can you imagine what that means before Allah on the Day of Judgment? Now, therefore what is Allah saying? What will bring about this beautiful life, this life which is free from stress, life which is free from calamities, life which is free from pain and suffering? What will bring that? Man amila saalihan fahuwa mumin. Two things. Good deeds and iman. Therefore, the usual understanding for all of this, if it works one way, the opposite also is true. Right? It's not only one. Opposite also is true. So if somebody does not have iman or if somebody has iman but does not do good deeds, then he will get the opposite of hayatan tayyiba. Hayatan tayyiba. A life which is hard, a life which is difficult. Allah says fa tu'minuna bi ba'di al-kitabi wa takfuroona bi ba'd. Now Allah is talking about people who are supposedly Muslim. We say la ilaha illa Allah. But when Allah sent His Kitab, we say this peace? Alhamdulillah, I will do. But the other one? Too difficult. Times have changed. This is America. Everybody is doing it. I have a fatwa from someone. Scholars for dollars. Allah says, are you this? A fatuminuna bi ba'di al-kitabi wa takfuroona bi ba'd. Fa mayyafa dhaliqa. What does it say? For them what? Khizyun fil hayati duniya. Allah said, I will give you a very very tough life. Allah is saying, I will make your life difficult. Allah is not saying the whole condition will change. No, no, no. Your life will be. Even if you are living in the middle of a Jannah on the earth, you will have disease, you will have problems, you will have an accident, you will break your leg. Others will be fine. Others will be fine. You will have a problem. And on the Day of Judgment, Allah says, this is in this life and on the Day of Judgment, in this ayah Allah said, I will reward you for all the deeds according to the best de

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. Alhamdulillah, O Lord of the worlds. As-salatu was-salamu ala as-shaytani wa-l-anbiyai wa-l-mursaleen Muhammad wa-r-rasulullah wa-sallallahu alayhi wa-alaihi wa-sallam, tassaleen wa-l-kasleen wa-l-kasaleen. Fama Badu, very beautiful question, which my brother asked. I have been reading Quran for a long time. Alhamdulillah, he is Muslim, so he will... from the time he was a little boy, he learnt it and said... But he said, but I do not find any change in myself. What is the meaning of that? And what should I do? So first and foremost, let me give you the good news. That the meaning of this is that you are, Alhamdulillah, you are a person who has Taqwa. You are a person who has Iman. Now, why do I say that? Because the consciousness that you have, that there is no effect. Is a sign of Taqwa. Because you know that there should be an effect. And you are concerned that there is no effect. So what must you do? Thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Because this comes from Allah. So this doubt is a sign that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala loves you and Allah wants to draw you close to Him. So therefore Allah puts this doubt in your heart. You go ask yourself, you have been reading Quran for so many years, why is there no change in yourself? So say, Alhamdulillah, that this doubt came in your mind. Very important, understand this. This doubt is not a bad thing. This doubt is a very good thing. Because there are millions of people who just read Quran, nothing. They don't have this doubt also. Their lives are going the same way. Whatever they were doing, good, bad, ugly, right? But they don't have you getting doubt. So Alhamdulillah, this getting of this doubt. Like for example, I came along with Jose Ramchur Ali. He said the one who Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala loves, he makes him remember his sins over and over again. And think about that. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, you ask me forgiveness, I will forgive you. bin Allah, yappur, zulm, jamia, I make tawba, my sin is forgiven. Alhamdulillah, it's over. So why do I need to remember it again? Why do I need to, am I doubting the forgiveness of Allah? No, I'm not. If Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala promised to forgive, Allah will forgive, we have no doubt about it. All I need to concentrate on, did I make tawba? Yes, I made tawba, istighfar, I made istighfar. I turned my life back to the right path inshallah. I made tawba and a specific tawba for the particular thing which I did wrong. I did all the, Alhamdulillah, inshallah, Allah has forgiven me, there is no doubt about that. But remembering the sin is a safety net. Because it reminds me that I did the right thing. Because it reminds me that I did that, which means that it can happen again, which means let me keep away from this. What is it that led me to that situation in the first place? So let me avoid all such situations and so on. So the remembering of your sins is a sign that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala loves you and Allah wants to keep you safe. Remembering of the good that you did, this is a bad sign. Because if you do something good and remember it, then it brings about arrogance. So do good and forget about it. Forget completely, totally wipe it out of your mind. Whatever good you did, some charity you gave, you were nice to somebody, you did something, forget about it, completely wipe it out of your mind. Allah knows, it's recorded. Nobody can take that away from you. You don't have to remember it. But sin is remembered. So in your case, Alhamdulillah, you have been reading Quran for a long time and you say, well, it has not brought any change in my life. So as I said, this is a good sign that this concern is there and I wish I had the same concern. I wish this concern for all of us because all of us are in the same boat. So first and foremost, understand, you are not alone. I wish you were alone, but you are not. Second thing is, now remember, change does not come from reading Quran. Change comes from reflecting on the Quran, which means understanding the Quran. Then change comes by changing your life. That's why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Allah did not say, why don't they read the Quran? Allah said, why don't they? Is it that they do not reflect on the Quran? Tadabbur ala kalam illa hi ta'ala. Right? No, qadhatu kalam. Tadabbur ala kalam. Do they not reflect on the Quran or are their hearts locked? Do they have khufr? Locks on the hearts, right? So the key and the requirement is to focus on wali kusra, focus on the kalam of Allah and to reflect on it. So for that obviously, you know, it's a given that if I am going to reflect on something, then I should understand it. I cannot reflect on something I don't understand. So to the question that Miraj ask

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. As-salamu alaykum. Ummah Madhu, first of all, I think we are very happy and blessed, especially to all our friends and brothers and sisters from Syria. God bless them. Alhamdulillah. There is a news, news of happiness for all of us. Alhamdulillah. But where are the signs of happiness? Where are the sweets? Where? Where is sugar? Where is sugar? Tomorrow. Everybody has sugar. Thank you, Alhamdulillah. Jai Hind. Alhamdulillah. The second thing I want to go into my actual khatara is, Soha Allah, those of them we see here, people who came as refugees, I talk to a lot of them, I talk to a lot of refugees, I talk to Iraqis and Syrians. Just to listen to their stories. And if you see their stories, Soha Allah, people who had factories, people who had businesses, people who had big hopes, people who were professionals, they lost everything. On top of that, they lost family members, they lost their sons and daughters, they lost their parents. They came to this country as refugees with nothing, nothing. They started doing, somebody who owns a factory, somebody who owns a big business, started working as a manual laborer in somebody's shop, started driving a taxi and whatnot. Imagine, this is not a story. The question is, what does it do to your heart? What does it do to your confidence? But SubhanAllah, each one of them is an inspiration of Allah. So anytime I see any difficulty, Alhamdulillah, Allah has kept me free from all difficulties, but anything that looks like a difficulty, I think about my friends. I'm deliberately not mentioning names because MashaAllah, there are so many of them. If I mention somebody, somebody will say, you did not mention my name. So I'll be like, what? I don't want to put myself in trouble. So, but Alhamdulillah, so this is something very important. I think this is something we should do, all of us is sit with people and talk to them and listen to their stories. It is a matter of great inspiration. As I said, we are talking about this because of what is happening and happened here, Alhamdulillah. But it applies to everybody. I have lived a long life and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala caused me to live in times with awareness and knowledge. So to give you a very quick list, I have seen the Russian-Cuban Missile Crisis in this country, 1962. I saw the Soviet Union, the USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at its peak and I saw it collapse. Doesn't exist anymore. I saw the breakup of Pakistan, East and West Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh. And I saw what happened now, what's happening in Bangladesh. I saw the peak of power of Indira Gandhi, absolute government under emergency in India and I saw the assassination of Indira Gandhi. I saw the assassination of our son Rajiv Gandhi. Right? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has shown many, many things. I saw the peak of the power in Iran of Shah, Raza Shah Pahlavi and the enormous coronation ceremony of him and his wife Farhad Iba. And I saw the same Raza Shah Pahlavi when he died. No country would accept the body to be buried. Same person. And many more but I think this is enough. That's why I say, live with awareness, keep your eyes open and ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala what is it that I'm seeing. When Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala mentioned in his kalam, And ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala what is it that I'm seeing. When Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala mentioned in his kalam, Who will even cry? Who cries for them? Who even regrets? Who will shed one tear? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in surah Dukhan Allah said, Imagine how many gardens and springs the tyrants left behind, As well as crops and splendid residences, palaces and luxuries which they fully enjoyed. And so it was. And we awarded it all to another people. And neither heaven nor the earth. Wept over them nor was their fate delayed. In all of these stories of so many things, so many changes. And wallahi, my love is my witness. No peace of heaven and no kitah of the earth will shed one tear for the oppressors. There will be no regret that the oppression is over. And inshallah it will end. Because this is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's sunnah. Two things, Allah never gives the entire earth to anybody. Whole earth, nobody. Non-Muslim, non-non-Muslim, not nobody. Nobody ever had complete control over the whole earth. Nobody. And second thing is Allah never gives that forever. Never. Every single empire in history lasted for a period of time. The largest empire in the history of mankind was the British Empire. Which at its peak controlled 25% of the earth's surface and it lasted for 400 years. Today the sign of the British Empire is the monarch, is the king of England. Whose power is equivalent to the king on a deck of cards. He is a tourist attraction. Eh? 400 years of rule. Allah never gives the whole earth to anyone and Allah nev

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Ahamdulillah, we listened to the presentation about what is happening in Gaza and all the aid and so on that's being given to them. I want to share with you a couple of thoughts. The thought I want to share with you is that number one it is when we are faced with situations like this, when we are faced with catastrophic situations, then it is easy to despair. It is easy to fall into despair and really question yourself and say, what is the use of even giving some money whatever I can give or you know how far does it go because we just heard that it doesn't go very far and so on and so forth. So the chances of that happening, the tendency to fall into despair, this is a very natural thing and it can happen. But I want to share with you some statistical data. They did a lot of research on concentration camp victims, people who have been incarcerated into concentration camps. And the research was to see who survived and who perished. Now they found three kinds of people. They found one who seeing the conditions, seeing the tortures and so on and so forth, they felt so completely powerless and totally desperate, they just died. Because they said there is no hope. We cannot get out of this, nothing can happen, they just died. The second group of people who also perished were people who believed in within quotes miracles, that the Mahadi will come and this will happen and the sun will rise from this side and that side and Allah will change this. They also perished. The people who survived through all the trials, the tribulations and unbelievable pain and suffering and concentration camps of people who were, who did three things. The first thing is they were completely and totally realistic. They looked at it in the face and they said, this is our situation. They didn't pretend, they didn't think, oh no, no, you see it's not that bad, no, no, no. This is our situation. We are in deep... You can fill out that, you know, four letter word or six letter word, whatever you like. They didn't make excuses, we are in this situation, number one. Number two, they said, so therefore what can we do no matter how small it is? Believe me that action is a life-viewing thing. Don't say, well, you know, I just heard that a box of diapers cost 200, I cannot afford $200, so I have only $10 in my pocket, I feel ashamed, so let me take my $10 and go home. No, no. You have $10, you give $10, don't worry about 200. They did what they could do, everyone, and what they could do is not like, you know what, I'm thinking about this game, that game, what not. I think I can spare, no, no, no, no, what you can do means the absolute, you know, thing that I can do for the sake of Allah. So first thing is look at it in the face and say we are in deep trouble, we know no excuses. Number two, do whatever I can do and third one is organize a game plan going forward, which is bury your own personal hatchets, stop feeling offended with each other, forget all your internal conflicts, work together. And people who did that, believe me they succeeded. So I say to you, put a smile on your face because Alhamdulillah, two things. Number one, this Ummah of Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam has seen much worse, much worse. That's why I keep saying read history. If you read history, what is happening in Gaza, what is happening in Palestine, what's happening and so on and so forth? Yes, it is terrible, it is horrible, it is very bad, it is the worst thing we have seen, but we have seen is the key word. This Ummah has seen ten times worse, a hundred times worse and they came out of that strong. Believe me, nobody can kill us. Nobody can destroy us because Allah promised His Habib Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam that this Ummah will not be destroyed. Nobody can destroy us. So forget it, don't even think about that. Nobody can destroy us. But they can cause trouble and that trouble is related to us because Allah says ... So look at ourselves and say, what is it that I am doing that I have become a trouble magnet? I draw trouble to myself. You know when we have all these difficulties and so on, we look at this strategy, that strategy, let us see what so and so is doing, let us see who can we elect, who can we support, who can we do? Do all of that by believing me. There is only one who can change destiny. Only one. So what is our connection with that one? By all means, go to rallies, support, this, that, vote, what not. But ask yourself, do you stand in that every day and do you weep and do you cry and do you say you are up? There was a time when your nabi used to ask you, today your nabi is not with us. Today we have to ask you. Yaarab, the one asking has changed, but the one giving has not changed. So give us, protect us. Like you protected those who are better than us. But Yaarab

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. [00:00.000 --> 00:21.760] My brother and sister, somebody sent me a very nice little quote and he said, our Sheikh,[00:21.760 --> 00:26.440] I don't know which Sheikh this is, but whoever it is, may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bless him[00:26.440 --> 00:33.480] and increase him in knowledge and taqwa and be pleased with him and never be displeased.[00:33.480 --> 00:41.760] He said, our Sheikh says, the only Islam you need to save is that which is in your heart.[00:41.760 --> 00:47.880] The only Islam you need to save is that which is in your heart.[00:47.880 --> 00:51.260] Allah ta'ala doesn't need Islam.[00:51.260 --> 00:52.840] It is not a religion.[00:52.840 --> 01:00.200] It is a way of life which is sent down to make the human species better versions of themselves.[01:00.200 --> 01:02.400] Don't worry about Islam in the world.[01:02.400 --> 01:09.240] Worry about the Islam within yourself and the world will automatically get better because[01:09.240 --> 01:11.320] Islam is not a face.[01:11.320 --> 01:13.800] It is positive conduct.[01:13.800 --> 01:20.200] More the positive conduct, more positivity in the world because again it was sent to[01:20.200 --> 01:22.080] make humans better.[01:22.320 --> 01:23.800] So, let me repeat that.[01:23.800 --> 01:28.160] The only Islam you need to save is that which is in your heart.[01:28.160 --> 01:31.440] Allah ta'ala doesn't need Islam.[01:31.440 --> 01:33.080] It is not a religion.[01:33.080 --> 01:38.960] It is a way of life which is sent down to make the human species better versions of[01:38.960 --> 01:39.960] themselves.[01:39.960 --> 01:43.420] Don't worry about Islam in the world.[01:43.420 --> 01:51.200] Worry about the Islam within and the world automatically gets better because Islam is[01:51.320 --> 01:53.400] not a face.[01:53.400 --> 01:56.000] It is positive conduct.[01:56.000 --> 02:02.320] More the positive conduct, more positivity in the world because again it was sent to[02:02.320 --> 02:04.000] make humans better.[02:04.000 --> 02:18.760] Subhanallah, if there is one thing, one reminder that I can say which completely and totally[02:18.760 --> 02:26.760] Alhamdulillah encapsulates where our focus should be, then it is this reminder.[02:26.760 --> 02:36.720] I ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to help us to remember and to practice.[02:36.720 --> 02:39.820] Islam is not a theory.[02:39.820 --> 02:43.160] It is not a philosophy.[02:43.160 --> 02:50.600] When we say it is not a religion, we mean it is not a set of actions or a set of worship[02:50.600 --> 02:51.600] rituals.[02:51.600 --> 02:54.080] Islam is a way of life.[02:54.080 --> 02:56.760] Islam is a practice.[02:56.760 --> 03:03.040] The one who is a Muslim is the one who practices Islam, not the one who knows about Islam.[03:03.040 --> 03:10.000] It is entirely possible that a person may know about Islam a great deal, but they will[03:10.000 --> 03:12.180] not be practicing Islam.[03:12.180 --> 03:19.860] But in that case, they will still be called Islamic scholars, but they will not be Muslim[03:19.860 --> 03:20.860] scholars.[03:20.860 --> 03:27.940] There is a world of difference between an Islamic scholar and a Muslim scholar.[03:27.940 --> 03:28.940] World of difference.[03:28.940 --> 03:33.500] The same thing applies to anything else.[03:33.500 --> 03:39.820] Somebody who knows a great deal about Christianity but does not practice is not a Christian.[03:39.820 --> 03:46.980] The Christians and the others have got these terms they have invented called non-practicing[03:46.980 --> 03:50.700] Christian, non-practicing Jew and so forth.[03:50.700 --> 03:52.020] Fine, no problem.[03:52.020 --> 03:54.220] That's their choice.[03:54.220 --> 03:59.060] But let me assure you that there is no such thing as an NPM, non-practicing Muslim.[03:59.060 --> 04:01.900] You become Muslim by practicing Islam.[04:01.900 --> 04:04.620] You don't become Muslim by knowing about Islam.[04:05.140 --> 04:09.980] Now obviously we need to know about something because if we are going to practice it, we[04:09.980 --> 04:10.980] need to know about it.[04:10.980 --> 04:19.020] So all knowledge of Islam that is gained, everything about Islam that we study must[04:19.020 --> 04:25.900] be studied with one purpose and one goal and one niya and one intention only, and that[04:25.900 --> 04:28.920] is to apply it in our lives.[04:28.920 --> 04:33.900] This is what the Sahaba, the companions of Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam did.[04:33.900 --> 04:37.740] They did not learn anything for the sake of learning.[04:37.740 --> 04:41.060] They did not memorize Quran for the sake of memorizing Quran.[04:41.060 -->

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. If you read Zakat somebody said Hajj. Rasul Rasool Allah said no. So they said, Ya Rasulullah please tell us what is the biggest sign of Islam? And he said muhabbah. He said muhabbah is the biggest sign of Islam, of being Muslim. Muhammad is brotherly love for one another because the other person is a Muslim. No other reason. Because the other person is a Muslim. I ask you and I ask myself, where should we place ourselves with this criteria? State of our Islam, our words, our actions, our thoughts, our society, where should we place ourselves? The correct position with respect to Allah's Ahkam and the Hadith of Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, all of which, not all of which, most of which I will tell you now in this Qutba, that every Muslim is a brother of every other Muslim. Every Muslim Moan is a sister of every other Muslim. This is our position in Islam. We have two issues. One is brotherhood of humanity and brotherhood of faith. Every human being is a brother or sister of ours, no matter what their faith is, irrespective of the faith. And every Muslim is a brother or sister of ours. Allah SWT said in Surah Al-Anbiya, Inna hadhi ummatukum ummatan wahidah wa ana rabbukum fa'budoon Allah SWT said which means, truly, this ummah, this brotherhood of yours, ummatukum is one ummah, ummatan wahidah, and I am your Rabb and therefore worship me alone. ana rabbukum In the Surah after that, alternate after that, after Surah Al-Anbiya, in Surah Al-Muminun, Allah SWT said, wa inna hadhi ummatukum ummatan wahidah wa ana rabbukum fa'budoon and verily this ummah of yours, this brotherhood of yours, is one ummah and I am your Rabb, so have my taqwa. In these two ayahs, Allah SWT told us that we Muslims are one ummah, defined on the basis of our unity, that we worship only Allah and we have taqwa only of Allah. We worship only Allah and we live our lives in obedience to Allah SWT alone. Allah SWT honoured us by saying ana rabbukum. He associated his rubbiyat with us. ana rabbukum Allah is not only Rabbul Muslimin, Allah is Rabbul Alameen. But Allah said ana rabbukum. We have one Rabb, one Nabi, one book, one faith. That is our brotherhood of faith in Islam. Allah SWT mentioned differences of opinion. And Allah SWT said, wa a'tasimu bi habli Allahi jami'an wala tafarraku wa adhkuru ni'mat Allahi alaykum idh kuntum a'ada'an fa alaf bayna quloobikum fa asbahatun bi ni'matihi yiqwana wa kuntum ala shafa hufuratin min an naar fa ankhadakum minha kathalika yubayyinu Allahul lakum ayatihi la'alakum tahtadoon Allah SWT said in Suratul Al-Imran, which means, and hold fast all of you together to the habli'Allah, to the rope of Allah, which is the kitab of Allah, which is the sunnah of His Nabi SAW, which is this deen of Islam. And Allah said, do not be divided la tafarraku, do not be divided among yourselves. And remember Allah SWT has favour on you. For you were enemies to one another, but He joined your hearts together, so that by His grace you became brothers in faith, brothers in Islam, and you were on the brink of a pit of fire and He saved you from it. Thus Allah SWT makes His ayat clear to you that you may be guided. Allah SWT warned us against converting difference of opinion into points of opposition. A difference of opinion is not opposition. If somebody disagrees with you, he is not your enemy. This is a big problem with us. I am your friend only as long as I agree with everything. The minute I disagree on something, I am your enemy. Then instead of focusing on the point of disagreement and saying, this is my understanding of something, this is the understanding of my brother, my teacher, my Sheikh, my father, my whoever. We say he is a lousy Sheikh. He is a lousy brother. He has no Iman. He is a Munafiqi. So from going, from addressing the argument, from addressing the point of disagreement, you start attacking the individual. This is the worst kind of humanity. Absolutely the worst. Allah SWT told us and reminded the Sahaba that when they used to oppose each other and they had enmity over trivial things, and that enmity divided them and made their own lives miserable. Just look at ourselves today. Who is miserable? Allah SWT said, Allah said I joined them. I remind myself and you that Allah SWT said, He did not say, He said do not have a difference. He said don't have a difference. There is a difference between this and that. The difference between the two is good. Welcome. No problem. But the difference between the brother and the sister is bad. Not my Fatwa. I will tell you the Fatwa of the Prophet in a minute. Allah SWT said, La tafarraku, la taqtatham, Qasam bayna hadhi bayna hadhi. A difference of opinion only means that several intelligent people are engaged in thinking about a particular matter. So they have differences of understanding their matter. That's all

⚠️ AI-Generated Content: This transcription was automatically generated using AI. Islamic Lecture Transcription - Part 1 Part 1/2 [00:00:00] In the name of Allah, the Merciful and the Compassionate. [00:01:00] Salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu hu. [00:02:00] As-salam, as-salam, alaikum as-salam. Wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu hu.

As-salamu alaykum. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen. Wa salatu wa salamu ala isharabu ila mbiya wal mursaleen. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and upon his family and companions. Tasleem and kaffir and kaffir. I want to ask a question. They said what is the cause of anxiety? Today is like an epidemic. Huge anxiety. Everybody has got tremendous anxiety. And their anxiety out of control becomes depression, becomes despair, all kinds of things. People lose working hours, they lose sleep. So they say what is the cause of anxiety and what is the cure? And they also said is anxiety the sign of a weak iman? So I want to say a couple of things to you. One is there is a Somebody asked this question to Sheikh Al-Husaymi R. Maudhaita. And he said anxiety is not necessarily a sign of weak iman. Anxiety is a sign that Allah SWT is testing you. When Allah SWT tests you, He puts you in a position where there is a perception of danger, perception of loss and so on and so forth. And you become anxious. So therefore what must you do when Allah SWT tests, Allah SWT also helps. This is Sunnah of Allah. Allah SWT does not test meaning leave you and go and die. No. If Allah tests you, He will also help you. But we have to ask for this help. So we ask Allah SWT for help. Right? We ask Allah for help. When Musa R. Isra, when Allah SWT said to him, go to Firaun. Isra will have Firaun. Isra will have Firaun. He has become rebellious. Go towards him, invite him to Islam. So what is Musa R. Isra's response? He's asking for help. He said I will go. He doesn't say I will not go. He said I will go. So therefore give me this. Over my heart. Give me understanding. Make it easy for me. Make this, I'm not making this order easy for me. Give me the words. Give me the expression. Untie the knot in my tongue. He's asking for help. We know from the Seerah of Rasulullah SAW, when they were awoken of Siddhi Khadil Anu and Rasulullah SAW were in the Ghar of Thaur, in the cave, and the Meccans were after them. And it was a wanted dead or alive situation. And they had put a bounty on the heads of Rasulullah SAW and awoken Siddhi Khadil Anu of 100 camels. It's a huge amount of money, right? Even today. In those days it was even more. And these people came and Allah SWT has told us, see even though the tracks to the cave and so on, these were obliterated because you know the sheep were raised on that and so on and so forth. But Allah SWT shows His Qudrat and His power. By allowing things to happen by external circumstances to remain the way they are until the end. And then Allah SWT changes conditions in a way where there's no doubt in your mind that this is only the intervention of Allah. For example, Ibrahim A.S. when Allah SWT decided to save Ibrahim A.S. from the fire, Allah did not put out the fire. Then that could be one way, put out the fire, big rain fall or something. Allah did not put out the fire, Allah SWT did not send Ibrahim A.S. and say, pick him up from the mid-air and take him, fly him somewhere. No. So as far as the people were concerned, Ibrahim A.S. they came to throw him into the fire, they threw him into the fire. They were successful. From their perspective we succeeded. We came here to burn him, we burnt him. But when he walked out of the fire they realized they could not burn him. But the same fire, the ropes with which he was tied, the ropes got burnt. But the skin of Ibrahim A.S. was safe. So Allah shows His Qudrat. So in this case of Ghara Saur, the horage came right to the Ghara. They came to the Ghara to the extent that Abu Bakr Asidu al-Ghada al-Anu looked up, he could see their feet. And he said, Ya Rasulullah, if they only look down, if they only look down they will see us. This is where Allah SWT shows His Qudrat. You will look down, you will look up, you will look right, you will look left, only and only if Allah SWT decrees. There is no looking down, up, what not by yourself. And what is the response of the Prophet? La tahzan inna Allaha ma'ana. Don't be afraid, don't be sad. Inna Allaha ma'ana, verily and truly Allah is with us. And he said, what do you say about the two, the third of whom is Allah? He said inna Allaha ma'ana, la tahzan. He said inna Allaha ma'ana, la tahzan. And Allah SWT later on, these words of the Prophet, Allah SWT sent them back as His words in the Quran. La tahzan inna Allaha ma'ana. This is the words of Allah, but first, recite the words of the Prophet. So the point I want to make and I want to remind myself and you is, if we want to combat anxiety, we have the cure. And the cure is, remind yourself. La tahzan inna Allaha ma'ana. This is the cure for all anxiety. La tahzan inna Allaha ma'ana. Because Allah SWT said, Allah bi zikr illahi tatwa innu alqulu. What is the opposite of anxiety? Itmina. Opposite of anxiety, itmina. Opposite of anxieties, itmina. Comfort, peace, harmony. And where does

[00:00:00 - 00:00:01] In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. [00:00:04 - 00:00:07] Peace and blessings be upon the honorable messengers and messengers. [00:00:07 - 00:00:10] Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and upon his family. [00:00:11 - 00:00:11] He has given us many blessings. [00:00:12 - 00:00:18] What is the meaning of structure? [00:00:18 - 00:00:22] Structure means there has to be a timetable of what you will do. [00:00:24 - 00:00:31] If you say exams, in two weeks you will have your finals. [00:00:32 - 00:00:42] What is your structure for getting 4.9 or 4.5 GPA? [00:00:44 - 00:00:45] What is the structure? [00:00:46 - 00:00:48] It has to be very specific. [00:00:48 - 00:00:53] I will wake up at this time, next I will do this, next I will do this, next I will do this. [00:00:54 - 00:01:02] So say I will wake up at 4am, I will pray with the Holy Prophet, make dua, read some Quran, pray some Fajr, then I start studying, [00:01:03 - 00:01:07] I study for two hours, then I have breakfast, I study for two hours, then I have something. [00:01:07 - 00:01:10] And this complete structure for the whole day. [00:01:12 - 00:01:14] And then you must follow that structure. [00:01:14 - 00:01:17] It's not enough simply to write a timetable and then throw it somewhere. [00:01:18 - 00:01:24] No, write the timetable and follow the timetable, which will get you to the end result. [00:01:25 - 00:01:30] If you don't have that structure, then the intention alone will give you some kind of good feeling, [00:01:30 - 00:01:32] yeah, well I have a good intention, I am working very hard. [00:01:32 - 00:01:33] What is very hard? [00:01:34 - 00:01:36] There is no such thing as very hard. [00:01:38 - 00:01:40] There is no such thing as very hard. [00:01:40 - 00:01:45] You are working effectively or unaffectively, that's it. [00:01:46 - 00:01:47] Ineffective work or effective work? [00:01:47 - 00:01:51] Effective work means that there has to be a structure and you are working according to that structure. [00:01:54 - 00:01:54] Right? [00:01:54 - 00:01:55] Follow the drill. [00:02:00 - 00:02:01] Follow the drill. [00:02:02 - 00:02:11] If you take the greatest and most successful armies in the world, [00:02:12 - 00:02:19] all of them have only one thing in common, and that is they fought according to structures. [00:02:21 - 00:02:25] Not because of passion, not because of over-the-bill, but because of the drill. [00:02:27 - 00:02:27] Structures. [00:02:29 - 00:02:37] And they overcame the enemy who was equally brave if not braver, who was equally passionate if not more passionate, [00:02:39 - 00:02:46] huge numbers, well armed, sometimes better armed than these armies, but they lost because there was no structure. [00:02:48 - 00:02:49] Take the Robaragi for example. [00:02:49 - 00:02:51] 2000 years they ruled the world. [00:02:52 - 00:02:53] Right? [00:02:53 - 00:02:54] Almost unbeatable. [00:02:56 - 00:02:57] Why? [00:02:57 - 00:02:59] Because of the discipline of the Roman legions. [00:03:00 - 00:03:01] They were brutal. [00:03:01 - 00:03:04] I mean their training was absolutely brutal. [00:03:05 - 00:03:06] But it was solid. [00:03:10 - 00:03:11] It was solid. [00:03:13 - 00:03:23] A Roman soldier, a Roman legionary, a regular Roman soldier, his armor, his weapons, and his utensils on a march, [00:03:23 - 00:03:26] what they carried was 50 kilograms. [00:03:28 - 00:03:38] And with that 50 kilograms they marched, walked 25 miles in a day in six hours. [00:03:41 - 00:03:49] And at the end of 25 miles they built a temporary fort, then they camped, put their tents, and they ate their food. [00:03:49 - 00:03:51] They did this every single day. [00:03:53 - 00:03:55] So what is the level of physical fitness? [00:03:56 - 00:03:57] What is the level of strength? [00:03:59 - 00:03:59] No half days. [00:04:00 - 00:04:00] Today is Sunday. [00:04:01 - 00:04:02] No, no, no, no Sunday, no Monday. [00:04:03 - 00:04:04] This is what you do. [00:04:06 - 00:04:10] Any soldier who was lax was beaten, literally brutally beaten. [00:04:11 - 00:04:13] No, no, no escape. [00:04:15 - 00:04:16] No slackers. [00:04:17 - 00:04:17] Result? [00:04:18 - 00:04:19] Nobody could be dead armed. [00:04:20 - 00:04:21] Victories everywhere. [00:04:23 - 00:04:23] Right? [00:04:23 - 00:04:25] They fought in their formations. [00:04:28 - 00:04:32] They did not suddenly, out of passion, suddenly attack, you know. [00:04:32 - 00:04:33] They fought in their formations. [00:04:34 - 00:04:36] And they fought until the last soldier dropped. [00:04:36 - 00:04:41] If they were losing a battle, they fought in the same formation until the last soldier was killed. [00:04:41 - 00:04:42] They didn't break formation. [00:04:44 - 00:04:45] They won. [00:04:46 - 00:04:47] Right? [00:04:49 - 00:04:51] And so also many, I mean I can give you example after example. [00:04:51 - 00:04:55] You take the Mongols, you take the British

—*This transcript was automatically generated by AI and may contain errors. *— [00:00:13 - 00:00:22] My brother and sisters, there is somebody called Ed Battista and he has written some things [00:00:22 - 00:00:27] very eloquently and he has coined his phrase called the tyranny of feelings, the tyranny [00:00:27 - 00:00:35] of feelings and he describes it as follows. He says the tyranny of feelings consists of believing [00:00:36 - 00:00:42] that my feelings are justified because they are my feelings. My feelings are justified because [00:00:42 - 00:00:49] they are my feelings. My feelings at this moment take precedence over all other considerations. [00:00:49 - 00:00:59] I have the right to express my feelings any way I see fit and if I believe that you are causing my feelings, [00:00:59 - 00:01:08] you are obligated to modify your behavior in order to align with my desired emotional state. [00:01:10 - 00:01:20] Now effectively it means that he says that as we said here my feelings are supreme and [00:01:22 - 00:01:30] if I'm not feeling good and if I believe that you are the reason for that, then you must change [00:01:30 - 00:01:38] your behavior so that I feel good. Now Ed Battista says this very nicely. He says that this is the [00:01:38 - 00:01:46] benefit of the newborn child, of a very young child because that child is actually incapable [00:01:46 - 00:01:53] of taking care of itself. If it is left, it will perish. So it needs to attract attention [00:01:53 - 00:02:06] and it needs to dominate the moment and force the caregiver, whoever it is, to give it care. [00:02:07 - 00:02:16] So the child will do anything that it takes to get that attention and to get that caregiver [00:02:16 - 00:02:26] to do what this child wants. So this is the problem. Now therefore, [00:02:30 - 00:02:34] however, the problem is when you carry this forward into your adulthood, [00:02:36 - 00:02:45] adulthood, with a young child one understands this but with adults this becomes a major problem. [00:02:45 - 00:02:51] Now if you see, if you think about it, what does this have to do? For example, [00:02:53 - 00:02:57] I'll tell you ways in which this is counterproductive and bad. For example, [00:03:00 - 00:03:10] if you encounter a person who disagreed with you or if you encounter somebody who gives you some [00:03:10 - 00:03:18] adverse feedback, your teacher, your parent, your superior, your friend, your colleague, [00:03:18 - 00:03:24] gives you some feedback about your behavior which is itself negative and they tell you that, [00:03:24 - 00:03:29] this kind of behavior is not good for you, not good for anybody else, it's going to cause you hurt. [00:03:32 - 00:03:39] The tendency of people is that I'm no longer your friend because you are not saying things to me [00:03:39 - 00:03:47] that I like. I don't like this teacher because the teacher is not giving me supreme importance [00:03:48 - 00:03:55] and so forth. So you close the doors to your own development, you close the doors to your own [00:03:57 - 00:04:05] learning. I give you a short, a very, very quick self-test to see whether you are in this [00:04:06 - 00:04:10] state of mind rot. I call this the entitlement state of mind. [00:04:11 - 00:04:19] And the simple test is that when you encounter, say for example, an argument, you disagree with [00:04:19 - 00:04:26] somebody, what is your first response? Is your first response, I don't like what you're saying, [00:04:27 - 00:04:33] I dislike what you're saying or is it to say, okay, so that's one way of looking at this, [00:04:34 - 00:04:39] I have a different way of looking at it and you are very objective about it. It's not a question of [00:04:39 - 00:04:50] like and dislike. If for example, you suffer from the inability to concentrate, you have a short [00:04:50 - 00:04:56] attention span, you have an attention span deficit, you are unable to concentrate on [00:04:57 - 00:05:03] a given matter for a long period of time. Now just think about this, the words I'm using, [00:05:03 - 00:05:14] unable, short as versus long and adequate, deficit, what does this tell you? It tells you [00:05:14 - 00:05:20] that there is a problem and that you are, that problem lies with you. It's with your inability [00:05:20 - 00:05:27] to do something and therefore what must you do? You must take the medicine. You are the one who [00:05:27 - 00:05:33] has a headache. So you must take the medicine to cure your headache. Meaning, if I don't have an [00:05:33 - 00:05:39] attention span that will help me to succeed because we know that in life, the only way to success is [00:05:39 - 00:05:45] by being able to concentrate and stay with one thing, with one worthwhile thing for a long period [00:05:45 - 00:05:52] of time until you achieve the goal. Now if you are not able to do that, then it means that there is a [00:05:52 - 00:05:58] problem with you. So what must you do? Correc

--- *This transcript was automatically generated by AI and may contain errors. * --- My brothers and sisters, Alhamdulillah Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gave us this beautiful religion of Islam and the best and most to me the best beauty of this of the religion is that it is so easy to follow. It is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala mentioned our purpose of existence as O maa khalaqtu l-jinnah wa l-insa illa liyaabudu. Allah said I have not created the insaam and the jinn for anything other than my worship. So the purpose of our existence is to worship Allah subhanahu ta'ala. Now Allah subhanahu ta'ala made that so easy that any action that we do with the intention of pleasing Allah even though the action may be something that we need to do we choose to do we find pleasure in doing and so on but if this action is done with the intention of pleasing Allah meaning that it is done in the way that Allah subhanahu ta'ala has commanded it is done according to the orders of Allah then this action itself becomes rewardable it becomes an action of worship an action that is to be rewarded. We have the famous hadith of the Prophet Muhammad where he said if you when you have a relationship physical relationship with your spouses Allah will reward you for it. So the sahibs said Ya Rasulullah we when we do that when we have a physical relationship with our spouses this is something we do for our own pleasure. So will we be rewarded for this? Nabi sadawala sadawala said if you did that in a way which is haram meaning if you did that physical relationship with somebody that you are not supposed to do it with then would you not be punished? They said yes. He said then should you not be rewarded if you do it with the person that Allah has made halal for you? Same thing applies to eating drinking our work everything if it is done in a way which is halal in a way which is permitted by Allah subhanahu ta'ala then it becomes something that we will be rewarded for. Take for example the simple matter of going to the masjid or praying in Jamaat. The hadith of Abu Hurra wa adhya al-anhu Rasulullah said he reported that Nabi sadawala said that when a person makes uduh at home and goes to the masjid for salah Allah subhanahu ta'ala raises his awards him awards him one hasana one good deed for every step he takes and wipes out one sin for every step that he takes and rasulullah said when a person prays in the masjid prays by jamar then the reward of that is more than 20 times more than 20 times the reward of praying on his own right so it is something which is the normal thing which any Muslim will do but Allah subhanahu ta'ala gives us that reward because he is because of as a sign of his great mercy and his generosity. Let me repeat that hadith Abu Hurra wa adhya al-anhu reported that rasulullah said the reward for salah performed by a person in Jamaat in congregation is more than 20 times greater than that of the same salah performed in one house or shop so when he is praying alone in his house or shop the reward of the same salah done in the masjid in congregation is more than 20 times greater. In this hadith Nabi sadawala did not specify how much more than 20 so as much as Allah wishes and then he continued and then he continues when one performs wudu perfectly and then proceeds to the masjid with the sole intention of performing salah then for every step he takes towards the masjid he is upgraded one degree in reward and one of his sins is eliminated until he enters the masjid and when he enters the masjid he is considered as performing salah as long as it is the salah which prevents him from leaving the masjid which means and if he once he enters the masjid he is sitting waiting for the salah to begin he may be reading quran he may be doing dhikr he may be doing nothing just sitting and waiting all of this is considered as being in salah and after the salah he sits there he waits there he makes dhikr he does nothing maybe he listens to a qatir or whatever he does is all considered as ibadah as part of salah and Nabi sadawala continued and he said and the angels the malaika keep on supplicating with Allah for him they keep on making dua to Allah for the person as long as he remains in his place of prayer so as long as he remains in the masjid and he is in the salah allow the malaika continue to make dua for him they say oh Allah have mercy on him oh Allah forgive his sins oh Allah accept his repentance so this is the dua of the angels malaika for the individual for you and me oh Allah have mercy on him oh Allah forgive his sins oh Allah accept his repentance accept his tauba and Nabi sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said this will continue as long as the man has or the woman has buddhu and this is a hadith in uh bukhari and muslim mutafaqun ali it's a authentic hadith agreed upon now think about it just alhamdulillah many of us may Allah bless all those who do it we pray in the masjid we go every day

---*This transcript was automatically generated by AI and may contain errors. *--- In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon His honored messengers and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him and upon his family and his companions. And many, many peace and blessings. So, my brothers and sisters, one of the questions we need to ask ourselves from time to time and the more we ask, the better. And that is to say, how do I know in what direction my life is going? Am I getting tawfiq to do good deeds or not? Where is my life leading me to? Is it leading me to Jannah or to Jahannam? It's very important to ask this question because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told us very clearly what happens in either case. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in Suratul An'am in ayah number 125, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, فَمَنْ يُرِدِ اللَّهُ أَنْ يَهْدِيَهُ يَشْرَحْ صَدْرَهُ لِلْإِسْلَامِ وَمَنْ يُرِدْ أَنْ يُضِلَّهُ يَجْعَلْ صَدْرَهُ ضَيِّقًا حَرَجًا كَأَنَّمَا يَسَعَدُ فِي السَّمَاءِ كَذَلِكَ يَجْعَلُ اللَّهُ الْرِجْسَ عَلَى الَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, whoever Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wills to guide, whoever... Please understand this, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala does not randomly decide to guide somebody or to leave somebody to be in their misguidance. The guidance that comes from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has to do with the desire of the person to be guided. There is no case of somebody who genuinely and sincerely wants guidance who did not get guidance because if that were the case, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala would not have sent his ambiyya. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala sent his ambiyya and this is evidence for anyone who wants evidence to say that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wants only one thing for us and that is guidance. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala only wants us to go to jannah. Those who go to jahannam are going to jahannam despite every opportunity that they had to choose to go to jannah. They chose not to go to jannah, that is why they are not going to jannah. I ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala not to put us in that group of people. So Allah says, whoever Allah wills to guide, he wishes to guide, he opens their heart to Islam, meaning that for that person, Islam will become the most beloved thing. He will love Islam, he would love to spend time in the dhikr of Allah, he would love to study Islam, he would love to practice Islam. He wants to please Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in every possible way. So whoever Allah wishes to guide, he opens their hearts to Islam. Now again, he says, whoever he wills to leave astray, meaning it's not that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala randomly decides, okay this person I will not help him, no. That person did not choose to obey Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. That person deliberately chose the path of misguidance. So whoever chooses the path of misguidance and therefore Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala leaves them there, he makes their chest tight and constricted as if they were climbing up into the sky and that is how Allah dooms those who disbelieve. Now the thing to understand therefore here is that if Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, if I think I am being guided, what is the criterion, what is the meter? Am I being guided towards Islam? Is Islam becoming dearer to me? Am I finding joy in the Tilawat of Quran? Am I finding joy in studying Islam, in listening to Islamic lectures, in studying of Islam, in practicing of Islam, in charity, in Hajj, in Umrah, in Salah? The biggest and best test is Salah. Have I started praying Tahajjud if I wasn't praying it, if I was praying it, am I praying it regularly and so on and so forth? What is the quality of my Salah? Is it becoming, am I getting closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala or not? How much time am I spending with Allah, meaning in the Masjid, in Islamic activities, in studying and learning and reading and listening to the Quran or Karim or anything to do with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala? How much time, duration of time? Think about that. So this is an indicator that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wishes to guide me and therefore Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is opening my heart to Islam. Now see the opposite. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Allah said when they became oblivious to warnings, meaning that they were on the wrong paths, they were indulging in haram, they were doing, they were disobeying Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and His Rasool Sallallahu alaihi wasallam and they were warned and they were advised but they refused. Now think about this. When that happened, Allah does not say, so I punish them. No. Allah said when they did that, we showered them with everything they desired. Allah says, Allah says, On top of them the doors were opened. Over them were opened the doors of every world

--- *This transcript was automatically generated by AI and may contain errors. * --- Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alamin wassalatuh wassalamu ala ashrafil anbiya'i walmursalin. Muhammadur Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wasami wasallam tasliman kathiran kathiran. Fa'ma ba'du fata'ala ta'ala inna allaha wa malaa'ikatahu yusalluna ala an-nabi. Ya ayyuha alladheena amanu sallu alayhi wasallimu taslimah. Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala ali Muhammad. Kama sallaita ala Ibrahimah wa ala ali Ibrahimah. Inna ka hamidun majeed. Allahumma barika ala Muhammadin wa ala ali Muhammad. Kama baraqta ala Ibrahimah wa ala ali Ibrahimah. Inna ka hamidun majeed. Yesterday we spoke about three different things. Today we look at the two other elements. And the first of that is money. And the reason money is important is because money makes the world go round, right? Things happen in this world because of money. Either the desire of money or having the money. Now, as I mentioned to you, the economic system at the time of Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam was very, very similar to the economic system that exists in the world today. It was a free market economy. It was not controlled by anybody. It was Mecca as a city was ruled by billionaires, by ruled by the wealthy people. Few of them used to gather in a place called Nadwa and they would, whatever they needed to decide, they would decide and that would be implemented. They didn't have a chief or a sultan or a sheikh or a king or somebody. They didn't have that. It was a bunch of businessmen who ruled the town. And they traded across, they had, they actually had a global international trade because they traded between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire. These were the days before the nation states. But if we interpret that in terms of nation states, we are looking at trade with at least in today's time, maybe 20, 30 different countries. So they had a multinational trading organization. They were not small businessmen. They were not small shoppers. These were big multinational businessmen who dealt in billions of dollars in today's money. People like Abdullah bin, people like Abbas bin Abdul Muttalib, Abu Sufyan, Abu Lahab, right, and you had others who were, Sufyan, Abu Sufyan, yes. These were, they were, Abdur Rahman bin Auf, Abdur Rahman bin Auf's actual amount of money which he left behind, his Tarka, when he passed away, we have the actual numbers. And with, according to those numbers, Abdur Rahman bin Auf, your Adal Anu was at least 10 times more wealthy than Elon Musk. And his money, his wealth was real wealth was gold. Halal. Halal. And gold, it was not, it was not the share on the share market. One day it goes up, one day it comes down. No, this is actual wealth. Right, so these are big people. Now, if you look at them today, we have to understand Islam is very much in favor of business, Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam in one hadith, and the, the Tahrir of the hadith, some people said it is a bit daif and so on, but it doesn't matter, Alhamdulillah the meaning of it is correct, which is he said that nine parts of baraka is in business and one part is in employment. So he encouraged business. He himself was a businessman and he was also employed for some time by Sayyidah Khadija al-Kubra, Umunah Radhe Allah Anha, and as a, as her agent to trade. So he knew both sides of the, of the, of the coin. So Islam is stands for what today we call a free market economy. It's not a regulated economy. Prices are not set. There is a incident in the, in the Seerah in Madina. At one point there was some shortage and the Sahaba came to the Prophet, they said, Ya Rasulullah please regulate the market, right? Set prices. Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said, no, I will not regulate what Allah has not regulated, I will not regulate. You regulate yourselves. So Alhamdulillah we know that free market is there. Now, however, there are some basic principles. First of all, in Islam, the business must not only be in halal things, but it must be morally defensible. Meaning that, for example, in the time of drought, right? You might say, well, I'm selling wheat or I'm selling corn, but in a time of drought, I am hoarding it and then I'm selling it for a high price. Even though the commodity you are selling is halal, which is, which is corn, but the way you are doing it has a big problem with it because you are now taking advantage of people's hunger and you are jacking up the price. Allahuhalam, this is whether it is halal or haram. We don't, we don't recommend that. We should not do something like this. So it's morally indefensible, even though the commodity itself is not, you can't say corn is haram, corn is not haram, corn is halal. But the way you are doing that business, that is a matter of, of doubt. And therefore you should not do it. Therefore w