Abdul Nasir Jangda – Jumuah Masjidus – 26 July 2024
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Prophet
Allah
created us
and gave us a purpose in life,
And our primary function and purpose in life
is
to live a life of meaning
and to live a life of devotion and
dedication and loyalty to Allah.
And this concept
of this devotion, this dedication,
this complete loyalty to Allah,
the essence of that is captured within a
word that the Quran uses
throughout,
and that word is.
That word
when approaching it,
many different translators have translated as piety,
righteousness,
but the word captures
many, many different
meanings and different emotions
that we're familiar with.
The concept of Al Bir
is inclusive
of devotion.
It includes dedication,
commitment,
loyalty.
And that's why Allah
also utilize this word when talking about
our relationship with our parents,
especially when they get into their older age.
Allah
describes it,
and it's also described as by
the prophet
To have that kind of commitment and loyalty,
to not have forgotten everything that they have
done for us up until this particular point,
And to be able to prioritize
them at that particular time,
when we might have many different things going
on, We have many different obligations. We have
many different needs and necessities.
We have a lot of different preoccupations,
but at that time, to be able to
prioritize them.
But to go back to the core of
the word and the usage, the most common
usage of the word in the Quran, Allah
Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala utilizes that word
to describe the relationship and the dynamic and
the behavior of the servant of Allah
in regards to their Lord Almighty, Allah
That how can you ensure
and make sure that you are devoted and
dedicated to Allah, that you have loyalty to
your creator,
and that you do not forget, you are
mindful of, you are aware of, you are
cognizant of everything that Allah has given to
you and provided for you up until this
particular point.
And in spite of how much you have
going for you and how busy you are
and everything else that's going on in your
life at that time, that you're able to
always maintain and remember
that Allah
is your priority,
and that you need to prioritize
Allah above and beyond everything else that's going
on with you.
And when the conversation and the question at
the time of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam
came up,
the narration mentions that a man came to
the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam inquiring
that what does that kind of loyalty and
devotion dedication to Allah look like?
What does that actually mean in my practical
life?
That Allah
revealed
a very comprehensive verse of the Quran.
This verse has been studied and has been
identified by many of the scholars throughout the
centuries
as a part of the core
curriculum within the Quran
on how to improve our relationship with Allah
and what it really means to have a
devoted, dedicated, loyal, committed relationship with Allah.
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says in I number
177 of Surat Al Baqarah,
This
is a fascinating style of the Quran and
how the Quran is communicating this to us
because this ends up being something that a
lot of people operate with many assumptions.
We all have assumed
what it means for me to have a
good relationship with Allah,
and that might not exactly be accurate and
correct.
So Allah
dispels
the misunderstanding.
He says,
what is not piety?
Piety is not just simply turning your face
to the East and the West,
And that's really fascinating because Allah says this
after the passage that talks about the turning
and the changing of the qiblah.
That about 16 to 17 months, almost a
year and a half after the Prophet
arrived in the city of Madinah,
the direction of the prayer, the qiblah was
turned, was changed.
It was before that, it was Al Mashul
Aqsa,
and Allah
by His command,
Allah commanded that turn your face and now
pray in the general direction
of the sacred mosque in Mecca, which houses
the Kaaba.
And so Allah had just commanded
that this is the direction that you must
pray in, and that believers will comply with
this command.
And after that, Allah
is saying, but yet, piety
is not just simply that you face this
direction or face that direction.
That's not piety.
That's compliance.
That's the bare minimum.
That's just doing what you're told.
That's doing the right thing the right way,
but that does not encapsulate piety.
So then one may ask, what exactly is
piety?
Allah
says, what is piety?
Number 1, for someone to put their faith,
their belief, their trust, their iman in Allah.
To believe in Allah.
To know that Allah is 1, and that
Allah is the creator, and Allah is the
sustainer, and Allah is the provider, and Allah
is the protector.
To live a life
where you put your faith and your trust
in your heart in Allah.
And to believe in the life of the
hereafter in general, but very specifically within that,
Allah
mentions
the day of resurrection, the day of judgment,
the last day.
And that's very very important because the day
of judgment, the day of resurrection,
as the name explains,
Yomul Hissab,
that is the day that we have to
answer for how we have lived this life.
All the choices we made, all the good
we did, all the bad that we committed,
we have to answer on that day. And
there's no escaping that questioning.
Each and every single one of us will
be held accountable,
and we will have to answer Allah. The
hadith of Prophet
says,
Every single human being will have to stand
before their lord on the day of judgement,
and there will be no intermediary. There will
be no one in between them. There will
be no one to shield you from that
questioning and that reckoning before God on the
day of judgment.
We all have to.
The person will look for some kind of
an out, and
the person will look to his rights, and
all he'll see is his deeds.
What you did, how you lived this life.
The person will look to his left.
They'll only see their own deeds.
And then this is specifically talking about the
person who did not live a life of
loyalty and devotion
to Allah, then that person will look back
in front of him. And this is very
heavy.
And then the person will see the fire
of * blazing in front of his face.
May Allah protect us all.
And so that moment is coming. The Prophet
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam says,
That the feet of the human being will
not be able to move from their place
until that person answers
4 questions at a minimum.
That a person will have to answer, How
did you spend the life that I gave
you?
When you were young,
all the energy and the enthusiasm and the
exuberance
that you had of youthfulness,
what did you do with that energy?
How did you spend that?
Doing what you wanted
or doing what I asked of you?
Then that person will be asked, your money,
your property, your wealth.
Where did you earn it from?
Were you loyal to me even when making
money and trying to get ahead?
And then where did you spend it? Did
you remember me?
Were you committed to me?
And then the person will be asked that
the knowledge that I gave you, how much
of that did you actually act on? Or
was that just another vanity
through which you satisfied your own desires and
fulfilled your own ego?
Or did you utilize that knowledge to live
a life of devotion and dedication to me?
So that person lives this entire life, whatever
it may be.
There's no guarantees.
20 years, 30 years, 50, 60, 70, whatever,
that they live that entire lifetime
while never forgetting
that I have to go and I have
to stand before Allah and I have to
answer for how I've lived this life?
They believed in
the
angels. They believed in the revelation that Allah
sent, the Quran.
When they begin, they believed in the prophets
and the messengers of Allah, Muhammad
And that was important to them, to live
a life in accordance with the message of
the Quran
and to live one's life
according to the example of Muhammad al Rasool
Allah sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
And then Allah
tells us the verse that I quote in
the beginning, which occurs a little bit later
in the Quran,
in Surat Al Imran.
Allah
says
That Allah
blessed
everyone
with some worldly
belongings, assets, property, wealth, whatever you want to
call it.
Allah gave it to us.
And it's part of the human test
that we have a deep attachment
to our belongings,
our money, our wealth.
We're very attached to it.
And at some level, from the human
kind of logic,
makes sense.
You work on it.
You work for it.
You invest in it.
So you have an attachment to it.
But Allah says
once again,
as attached as you may have been to
your worldly belongings,
your loyalty
to Allah needs to be greater.
So piety is someone being able to give
their wealth away,
separate from their hard earned wealth,
in spite of how attached they are to
it, in spite of how much they love
it,
they have the ability to part ways with
it.
By sharing it with their family and their
loved ones,
showing kindness,
compassion,
caring for maybe the less fortunate
within one's own family.
That being able to part with your wealth
to give it to the orphans,
those in need,
that those whom
Allah has placed in this very difficult circumstance
by the wisdom of Allah. But it's a
test for the all the rest of us
that will we step up, will we do
our part? That's why the prophet so
beautifully said,
pointing to his two fingers. The prophet
said that I and the one who cares
for an orphan will be together like this
in paradise.
That were you able to part ways with
your wealth to help those who desperately needed
your help.
That those that were destitute, those who were
suffering, those who did not know where their
next meal would come from.
Were you able to help them?
Or were you so
loyal to yourself and your pleasure and your
desires and your ambitions and your ego
that you decided to just keep hoarding this
wealth?
Or were you willing to part ways with
it to earn the love and the pleasure
of Allah
That those
the travelers that might find themselves in difficult
circumstances and they need help and assistance.
Were you willing to help people who needed
your help and assistance?
The people that came to you
asking you for help.
Whether they were asking for themselves
or they were asking for others in need
or they were asking for the sake of
the deen.
That somebody came to you and said, the
house of Allah needs your assistance.
People over there need your help. So these
people that came to you presenting need before
you,
were you able to prioritize that over what
you wanted,
what you desired?
Because that, again, is the sign and the
demonstration of that loyalty.
Those who were
stuck
in servitude and slavery, and they needed financial
aid and assistance to be able to escape
the clutches of slavery and servitude.
Were you willing to help them?
And Allah
says, Did you follow with your obligations?
What Allah mentions here isn't
even. This is very interesting and very profound.
The scholars highlight this. Allah
is not talking about somebody praying all night
long and somebody fasting every other day.
Allah
is talking about the bare minimum,
obligations,
the
the pillars.
Did you establish the prayer? Pray 5 times
a day. Did you give your zakat?
Was everything a negotiation?
And everything was a discussion,
constantly looking for loopholes.
Well, do I have to pay zakat on
this? But what about this? And what about
that? Not to deny the importance of the
fiqh of it and the technicalities of it,
but there is a big difference between somebody
educating themselves on it
versus somebody who's trying to actually negotiate their
way out of something.
They established the prayer
and they gave their zakat and their charity.
And Allah
with emphasis
that is captured within the language,
Allah says, particularly
those people who always kept their word.
They fulfilled the promises they made.
They fulfilled the contracts that they signed.
They kept their word. They kept their promise.
People of honesty, people of integrity, people of
decency,
that that's a sign of piety.
Too often,
we ourselves
have, maybe,
been guilty of this.
Or we've witnessed this
that there's this bizarre contradiction sometimes
that look at this equation that Allah gives
us and look how balanced it is. That
it's talking about making sure that you are
dutiful to Allah, you are praying. You are
giving your zakat. You are worshiping Allah, believing
in Allah.
But it's also talking about that you are
good to the people around you, and you
have integrity and honesty,
And you have character
and compassion and mercy.
And a lot of us get caught in
the trap of
being lopsided,
where we place all the emphasis onto one
side of the equation or the other.
That maybe I'm very particular about my salah
and my Quran and my fasting and
fulfilling those kinds of religious,
spiritual,
ritualistic
obligations.
But then my character, my integrity,
it's
truly
problematic
and very reprehensible.
It's embarrassing,
and that's a contradiction,
and that's not piety.
Even if the person is fasting all day
and praying all night,
but then that person does not fulfill the
rights of the people in their lives, and
that person does not keep their promise, they
have no integrity, they have no honesty, no
decency,
then that's not piety, Allah says.
And at the same time, the opposite side
of the
the opposite issue is also a problem.
Where someone,
good for them,
they're very honest, they're sincere, they're very nice
and kind and polite and generous and all
of that.
But they are completely oblivious to what Allah's
right is upon them.
That that person can't remember the last time
they put their face on the ground in
front of Allah.
That person can't tell you when's the last
time that they saw the door of the
masjid.
That person can't tell you when's the last
time they picked up the Quran.
That's
an equal problem, if not even greater.
Because somebody who cannot be dutiful, cannot be
good to their Lord,
how do you expect that person to be
good to anybody else?
And so we have to maintain this equilibrium
and this balance
of fulfilling both sides of this equation.
And Allah says that that is piety.
Now, once somebody is
doing what they need to do,
the Prophet
in a beautiful narration tells us,
What Allah is offering you is very precious,
very valuable
because Allah is offering you paradise.
And nothing worth having came easy or came
cheap.
So then Allah will test you.
And the people of piety,
the people of loyalty, and dedication, and commitment
to Allah,
they stand firm and stand strong.
That they are patient
in the face of difficulty and adversity
and difficult challenging moments.
They are firm and they are strong. They
are loyal and they are dedicated. They are
not so easily moved
from their mission and their purpose of life.
Those are the people that were honest. They
were truthful. They were loyal to Allah.
And those are the people that are conscious
of their Lord.
May Allah
make us amongst them.
Before we conclude
and begin the prayer,
a very necessary and important reminder once again.
And this needs to be happening constantly and
every day, multiple times a day wouldn't be
sufficient.
Some of our brothers from our community and
even some of the people of our
Qalam family,
they're currently on another medical mission visiting Chazah,
and they've been sending the news and the
images and, you know, just a condition on
the ground there.
And so it's very important that we remember
our duty and our obligation to our brothers
and sisters
to work to speak for
justice and the truth and what is right
and what is correct,
donate and contribute and give whatever we can
give we just talked about,
we just learned about from the book of
Allah from the Quran,
that we have an obligation and our duty,
and that demonstrates our loyalty
to Allah
and to our Islam and to our iman,
and continue to pray and continue to make
dua.
That may Allah
grant victory and may Allah
grant peace and tranquility to our brothers and
sisters in Gaza.
You can probably tell, there's
quite a bit of construction and work going
on here at the campus, so we apologize
for any kind of inconvenience,
and we appreciate you, Insha'Allah,
accommodating
all the different construction and work that's going
on. Alhamdulillah, our programs are still continuing.
So all the different weekly programs and classes
and and everything else is
on schedule.
So we invite you to keep on coming.