Ahmad Saleem – Success From the Lens of the Quran
AI: Summary ©
The Arabic language has the concept of success, defined by the generation of the Hanball, which is the God. Success is defined by the generation of the God, the Hanball, and the generation of the person they are speaking to, which is the Hanball. Success is rewarded and lost, and successful people should be rewarded with their actions and rewarded with their actions. Success is a result of their actions and actions they have rewarded. Success is a fixed fixed amount of time within a life, and reevaluate one's successes and failures is crucial for personal success. The " 75-year life" is a finite life within it, and correcting one's definition of success is crucial for future success.
AI: Summary ©
Today's concept is going to be something that
touches every person's life.
Each one of us has thought about it,
thinks about it, and will always think about
it.
It's something that we all are striving to,
looking after, and it is something that not
only touches your lives as Muslims, but our
lives as Muslims, but it touches every single
person.
And if we do not have a definition
for this, then the society and the big
corporations will end up deciding what this particular
word means to you in your life.
You have a person, recently I've been traveling,
I met varying different individuals, masha'Allah, and
somebody will introduce me, they're like, oh masha
'Allah, my name is so and so, I
have two sons who are doctors, masha'Allah.
My name is so and so, I've been
in the community for 29 years, by the
way, one of my sons works in NASA
and the other one works in Facebook.
My son is doing PhD in Yale.
My daughter just got accepted in John Hopkins.
And the list goes on and on.
The concept for today is, what is success?
What is success?
In the absence of a Muslim definition or
a Quranic lens definition, the society around will
tell us, and many times because we come
from lands that were colonized by the Brits
or the French or the Belgians or whatever
so, when we come to these lands, a
lot of the definitions that we have for
success is the definitions that have been placed
in our minds by our colonizers.
And as science will tell you, that it
takes almost three generations for the trauma and
the concepts that we inherited subliminally without even
knowing for those concepts to leave us.
So the question happens is, what is success?
In the Arabic language, the word success is
denoted by two different words.
It's either najah or falah.
We'll get to that.
There are two words, najah and falah.
Amongst other words, but the primary ones are
najah and falah.
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, He says in
the Quran, بَعْدَ أَعُوذُ بِاللَّهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ
فَأَمَّ الْإِنسَانُ إِذَا مَبْتَلَاهُ رَبُّهُ فَأَكْرَمَهُ
وَنَعْمَهُ فَيَقُولُ رَبِّي أَكْرَمًا When
a human being is tested, فَأَمَّ الْإِنسَانُ إِذَا
مَبْتَلَاهُ When Allah tests, فَأَكْرَمَهُ And if Allah
tests you and Allah honors you with generosity
and blessings, وَنَعْمَهُ Allah gives you نعيم and
أَكْرَمَهُ Allah honors you and is generous to
you, فَيَقُولُ We end up saying, رَبِّي
أَكْرَمَنِي or رَبِّي أَكْرَمَنِي My Lord has honored
me.
I've been honored by my God, my Lord.
Then Allah says, وَأَمَّا إِذَا مَبْتَلَاهُ فَقَدَرَ عَلَيْهِ
رِزْقَهُ And when Allah decides to test by
limiting the provisions that He gives us, تَقْدِيرَ
الرِّزْقَ فَيَقُولُ That person says, رَبِّي
أَهَانَنِ My Lord has humiliated me.
And in these verses Allah is telling us
something.
That the concept that we have that Allah
gives abundance to someone, Allah gives worldly success,
Allah allows your daughter, your son, yourself, your
wife, your relatives, your dad, your mom, your
grandpa, any of them to have momentary falah,
momentary najah, momentary success in dunya is not
a sign of Allah being nice to you.
Neither is that if Allah has constricted your
rizq, is a sign that Allah is not
happy for you and that is a failure.
If you look at the word najah in
lughah, najah basically means very simple, اَلظَّفْرُ بِشَيْء
You found something, you got something.
You were trying, I mean thieves, they enter
a house and they were successful.
They were able to steal the things they
wanted.
That's najah.
ظَفَرْ بِشَيْء You just got something.
That's it, you got something.
That's all najah is.
It's a singular event.
You were after something, you got it.
As for falah, it is number one, الفوز,
being victorious.
وَالنَّجَٓاءَ, and to be saved.
وَالبَقَاءَ, and it's permanent.
فِي النَّعِيمِ And this permanence is not in
challenge and difficulty and calamity and trials, but
this permanence is in bounties and khair and
abundance.
That is why in the entire Quran, Allah
SWT not once used the word najah.
It's not used once.
Rather 40 times Allah has used the word
falah and its derivatives.
يُفْلِحُونَ أَفْلَحًا From the first page of the
Quran when you open, أُولَٰئِكَ هُمُ الْمُفْلِحُونَ These
are the successful ones, the ones who succeed.
So a victor, somebody who's victorious, somebody who's
a najah person, is a person who may
be absolutely successful in his school, but a
failure in his life.
That is not a person who is مُفْلِح.
He's a najah.
He's just a victor in one sliver of
his life.
On the contrary, a person could be a
CEO of a company.
He made it to the C-suite, but
everybody around him hates him.
Is that success?
Is that najah?
Is that what we're after?
So if you think about it, if we
go and understand the Quran and the Quranic
perspective, Allah SWT describes falah in four boxes.
Al-falah, a person who's, if you say
this person is a مُفْلِح person, he is
truly a successful person in the eyes of
Allah.
What does he have?
He's got the four boxes and in each
box, he is a victor.
And the culmination of these four boxes makes
you a successful person in the eyes of
Allah.
The first one is that you must be
successful مع الله.
You must be successful with Allah SWT.
You must have your relationship and your acts
together with Allah.
Every single one of us knows, do good,
good will be done.
If you don't do good, right?
There'll be thukai for you at the end.
Kuch na kuch hoga.
We all know that.
If I do good, good will be done
to me for eternally.
If I do bad, falakah.
There is gonna be something in akhira and
we all are aware of it.
Al-falah ma'allah is that we actualize
and internalize this belief of ours.
And this is what we suffer with.
As human beings, we are insan.
Our fitrah, it's tainted with this one thing
and it's a test for us that we
forget.
Every single one of us knows becoming angry
or anger is bad.
Ask a seven-year-old and a seven
-year-old.
They'll give you an answer, anger is not
good.
But most people don't have control over their
anger.
What happened?
It's that disconnect that people have from knowing
what is important but then actualizing that important
thing as important in their lives.
There's a difference, right?
If you know it, why is it not
in your amal?
If we know it, why are we not
acting upon it?
Because it has not truly taken the level
of importance it should have in our life.
So success in the first category in the
box is falah ma'allah.
The second category is falah ma'al-usrah
wal-banu jaldatihi, and the people in the
community.
With your family and the community around.
Success with them.
And that is denoted by, you are a
person that harms no one and nobody harms
you and you are willing to rectify and
solve things and everybody around is happy with
your existence.
Then, falah ma'azdat.
How many of times we know people that
are super successful in economy, socioeconomic status, they're
super successful in family, everything is going well
for them, but they're extremely horrible about taking
care of themselves.
Their unkempt hair.
You see this, you'll go to a doctor,
he doesn't look like he's a doctor at
all.
He doesn't know, he doesn't have a relationship
with self.
His personal growth has stagnated ever since he
graduated.
How many of us have taken a chance
to pick up a book and read after
we graduate?
So that I can grow myself, my relation
ma'azdat.
And then, success with ilm and amal.
Ilm and amal, with knowledge and practice.
If we succeed in all of these, only
and only then are we successful in the
eyes of Allah.
But if we fail in all, but succeed
in one over here, then that would be
your relationship with Allah.
And then, coupled with that is your family
and your community.
The rest, with your that, there's some deviances,
no problem, Allah can take care of that.
But the first two are essential.
Relationship with Allah and relationship with the that.
How long is an exam?
Three hours, four hours?
If your daughter or son is taking four
courses, 12 hours?
We have so much focus on that 12
hours of that person's life that 12 hours
times four, 48 hours, that person's let's say
two weeks of their life when they have
to give all of those exams compared to
their seven years of life that they're going
to live.
We'll add 75 if people get offended, 75,
right?
75, compared to that two weeks, what's more
important?
Those two weeks or the entire life?
And now take this entire 75 years of
life and compare this with akhirah, how long
is that?
Eternity.
And those of you that know basic math,
anything over infinity is zero.
Your life in akhirah is infinity, it's infinite,
there is no end.
So whatever you do and you and I,
we do in this life, whatever we do,
this particular life is finite.
And within this life, those two weeks or
three weeks that we have so much importance
that we are willing to sacrifice our child's
iman so that he can get a piece
of paper.
If you have success in one, but you
lost Allah and you lost your family, you
lost your community, is that really a success?
Is that really falah?
We need to reevaluate that.
And on top of that, you paid 20,
30, 40, 50,000 dollars for your son
or daughter to lose their iman.
And then after that, when everything is done,
then they will come to the imam or
the community leaders and say, what do I
do?
My son or daughter is going through this
situation.
It's a very, we all as a community
need to wake up.
What are we after?
Is this success that your daughter graduated and
now she doesn't wanna get married and she's
45, is that success?
And that parent now comes and says, oh,
what do I do imam?
She doesn't wanna get married.
Is that success?
Is this success that you have literally men
who are in their 40s and 50s that
are focused so much on career because their
parents focused them on that and they have
left everything and they're having haram relationships left
and right to fulfill their desires and failure
to commit.
It's very antithetical to our existence as Muslims
because we have misunderstood the concept of success.
We're willing to sacrifice everything for that document.
But the piece of document that you will
be given, a one piece, that one document,
each and every one of us, our lives
revolve around this.
You start off with a document, a birth
certificate.
You come out and you get a document,
your immunization certificate.
You come out and you're given your first
graduation certificate from KG.
And then they're onward, document after document after
document.
And then we send our kids off for
four years for another document and they're not
done.
They're still in the second year, so much
pressure.
You should get a master's degree, get another
piece of document.
They keep on getting these accolades and accolades
and your life is spent collecting these documents,
not knowing that when you leave this earth,
there is a document that will be here
in this world that will be issued to
you, but you will not see it.
And that document is your death certificate that
will determine the end, but also your infinity.
It will determine how your infinite life is
going to be.
As Imam Siraj said, my son, I'm more
happy that he is a sweeper and a
cleaner in a school with his iman intact
than a graduate of any Ivy league school
when he loses his iman.
Wake up before it's late.
As a community, we are sleeping and our
enemies are at work.
We had few khutbahs on LGBTQ and then
everybody was like, oh, the imam supports LGBTQ.
You can't hide from these realities.
You can't close your eyes like ostriches and
put your head in a hole.
You can't come in and say, mashallah, inshallah,
everything is going to be good as long
as I read the four qul on my
son.
This is not how Islam works.
And it is important for us to wake
up now before it is too late.
There is no jawaaz in Islam for a
parent to send their daughter off to a
dorm.
There's no jawaaz for him.
Like I spoke to so many schools.
Like you can't flip the Quran upside down
and make an excuse that, oh, this was
this.
There's no jawaaz for that in Islam.
You should go and check out some of
the times these houses and all the dorms.
You'll understand what I'm talking about.
So as a community, we really need to
go back and correct our definition of success.
Success is not these papers.
Ask any of these kids, who's the most
successful person?
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, all of these names.
The most successful person in this world today
is the one with whom Allah is happy.
That is success.
I say this and ask Allah to forgive
me and you and all Muslims.
So ask forgiveness, for He is the Forgiving,
the Merciful.