Remember that you are only a visitor

Auto-generated transcript:My dear brothers and sisters, in the famous hadith of Abdullah ibn Awar r.a who reported from the Prophet s.a.w. The Prophet s.a.w. took hold of his shoulder and said, Be in the world as if you are a stranger or a traveler. Be in the world as if you are a stranger or a traveler. Among the teaching stories that we hear, the story of a man who came to the house of a wise man and he saw that the house had no furniture, absolutely nothing. The story is also told about the house of a man named Farid r.a. So maybe this relates to him. So he saw there was no furniture. So he asked him, where is your furniture? So this wise man, he asked the man, where is yours? So that man said, I am a traveler. He said, so am I. Ibn Awar r.a used to say, if you survive to the evening, don't die. Do not expect to be alive till the morning. And if you survive to the morning, do not look forward to the evening. In a healthy condition, prepare yourself for illness. And while you are alive, prepare yourself for death. And these are in Bukhari. I will send you the references of this also, inshallah. Another hadith in Bukhari, in Ibn Bajah and in Musnad ibn Ahmad, Rasulullah, Rasulullah said, What have I to do with the world? In connection with the world, I am just like a rider who sits under the shade of a tree, then goes off and leaves it. And this is in Tilmidi, in Namaja and Musnad Ahmad. Rasulullah said, what do I have to do with the world? I am like a traveler, I am like a rider on a horse who takes, rests for a little while under a tree and then continues on his journey. The great jurist, Al-Fudail bin Yaad, Rahatul Ali, said to a man, he asked him, how old are you? The man said, 60 years. Al-Fudail said, you have been traveling to your Rabb for 60 years, which means that you are about to arrive at your destination. So the man said, Al-Fudail said, do you know what is the meaning of that? He said, when a person knows that he is a slave and that he will return to Allah, he knows that he is to be asked about his deeds. If he knows that he will be asked, he should prepare answers to the questions. So the man asked him, he said, he asked Al-Fudail, he said, what shall I do? So Al-Fudail bin Yaad, Rahatul Ali said to him, that is an easy matter. So the man said, what is it? How is it easy? Al-Fudail said, you should stick to the straight path, meaning do not disobey Allah, do not anger Allah. He said, you should stick to the straight path for the rest of your life. You already live for 60 years, whatever is left, stick to the straight path for the rest of your life and Allah will forgive your past. You will commit sins, inshallah. And if you commit sins for the rest of your life, you will be held accountable for those and for the deeds that you committed throughout your life. So at whatever point in time we get some guidance, Alhamdulillah, straighten yourself from that time onwards. Don't worry about the past. And this is one of the things that shaitan tells. Shaitan says, oh, but you know, your whole life you lived like this. Your whole life you disobeyed Allah. What is the point now? There is always a point, even if it is two minutes before you die. We don't know whether it is two minutes or two hours or two days or two centuries. So from the moment you get the enlightenment, the moment you understand, yeah, I've been doing something wrong, immediately stop. Now, in the light of the above, a poet said, if a man walks for 60 years to a destination, then the destination will be very close. The destination will be very near. Ibn Abbas narrated that Rasulullah SAW said, there are two blessings which people lose. What are they? He said, they are health and free time. And this is in Bukhari, health and free time. Two blessings that people lose. Especially if you think about it, you know, in youth, how much of free time there is. Schools, colleges and so on. In your, when you start working, you realize you get an annual vacation of two weeks. If you're working for any company and so on, especially in the West, two weeks is standard, two weeks annual vacation. But in schools, when you are in school and college, you get two months of summer holidays, you get another month of winter holidays. So like it's about three months a year, you're free. Plus you've got a schedule which is, you know, more or less, half the day is free and then you are. So how much of free time there is? And so as you grow older, that free time, yeah, it is. And then once you retire again, the whole time is free. So Rasulullah SAW is saying, take advantage of health and free time. Ibn Abbas, this is a famous hadith of, which is called five before five. Ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas, reported from Rasulullah SAW. He said, Rasulullah SAW was saying to a man, seize five opportunities before five events. What are they? He said, your youth before your old age, your health before your illness, your richness or wealth before your poverty, your free time before your being occupied, and your life, before your death. Volunteer 308. Hury, The We used to preach to each other, we used to remind each other at the beginning of Islam saying, O son of Adam, perform good deeds in your leisure time before you become busy, in your youth before your old age, in your health before your illness, in your life before your death, and in this world before the hereafter. Abu Musa al-Ashari reported from Rasulullah SAW, and he said, Allah SWT Jalla Jalaluhu stretches out His hand in the night so that the one who committed evil during the day may repent. Allah SWT stretches out His hand in the night so that the one who committed evil during the day may repent. And He stretches out His hand in the daytime so that the one who committed evil during the night may repent. And He said, O son of Adam, perform good deeds in your leisure time before you become busy, and this continues until the sun rises in the west. And this is in Muslim in Kitab-e-Tawbah. My brothers and sisters, I remind myself and you that there is absolutely nothing in what I have said here which is new. There is nothing in any of these things which you have not heard before. We have all heard these things before. We have heard particularly these Ahadiths. Or we have heard something else which is of the same nature. The question is, when will we wake up? When will we actually remember this? If we really believe that we are travelers, what does a traveler do? Just sit and think for yourself that if you are a traveler, all of us have been travelers. We all traveled to some place or the other. Just imagine, when you traveled, what did you do? If it was a foreign country, then your first focus was, do I have my passport? Is the visa that is stamped on the passport, is it valid? And when I reach there, do I have some currency to spend? Or am I carrying currency which can be exchanged? If you land in Saudi Arabia, you know, with Peruvian dollars or something, it's not going to work. So you need to have some, either have real or you have some currency, you have US dollars or pounds or something which can be changed. So do I have currency? Do I have money? When I reach there, do I have some currency? When I reach there, is there somebody there who can come and receive me from the airport? Or, you know, if I need any help, at least minimum, do I have some phone number I can call? Whichever, this is all our focus, right? Then, on this end of it, what do I pack in my bags? I mentioned this before in another, this also. What am I going to pack in my bags? Because you've got a baggage allowance. You can't take the whole house. So what will you take? And what will you take depends on what will I need there. Okay? Okay. Okay. So you'll be going from, and with international travel today, this has become so, that's a common experience for us. You leave a country where the temperature is, you know, 35 degrees or Celsius, right? So it's 35 degrees, 38 degrees, 40 degrees hot. And you're going to a country where when you land there, the temperature is going to be, you know, almost the opposite of that. Minus 35. It's minus 35, but it's very cold. So now what do you do? You are, you, when you go from here, you are going to be carrying warm clothes. So if somebody sees you, he says, you know, what is the man? He's mad or whatever. Why is he carrying this big jacket and stuff? You know, this is hot. Because he's focused on where he's going to land. When I land there, what do I need? So even though carrying that jacket and whatnot might be a bit of a nuisance here, it doesn't matter. I need it there. So this, this nuisance is acceptable because it will give me comfort in the other place. I think. This is a story about Al-Waleed. I've been, I've been, I've been, I think if I'm not mistaken, he came for Amra and he asked somebody, he said, are anybody, is anybody here from the Tabain? So they said, yes, there is a person here. So he went to meet him. And he asked him, he said, why am I afraid? Why am I afraid of death? So this Tabain said to him, he said that you have spent your time and energy and so on beautifying your palace here. Whereas where you have to go, there is no palace. Where you have to go is completely, it's like a ruin. So instead of beautifying that palace, you spent your money here. So naturally you don't look forward to. You don't look forward to going there. I always tell people, those who are the difference between those who live in the Middle East and those who live in America is America gives you citizenship and so on and so on. So people who go to America, they don't think of coming back to India. They're going there to live there. So they save money there. They buy property there and so on. And, you know, they settle there. Whereas people in the Middle East, you know that you cannot live in the Middle East.