Ammar Alshukry – Death Is The Ultimate Reminder
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
All praise is due to Allah. We seek
his guidance and his forgiveness, and we seek
refuge in Allah from the evil of ourselves
and the whispering of our desires.
Whom Allah guides, no one can misguide, and
whom he allows to be misled, no one
can guide. And I bear witness that there
is nothing worthy of worship except Allah alone
having no partners
and that Muhammad
is his slave and his messenger and his
perfect worshiper.
To proceed,
a
young woman
whose
name was Rahab al Burri.
Rahimahallaha had graduated from the University of Missouri.
At the age of 26, she was a
journalist
working for ABC. She'd been recently been married
and had moved from Missouri to New Jersey
and
was working in New York City.
She had done everything right. She was deeply
religious, and she had her whole life ahead
of her.
At the age of 26,
she passed away
from cancer.
Her
story
was
commemorated in a blog that she kept,
and I would read from time to time.
She called it life in rehab, a play
off of her name, Rahab.
May Allah have mercy on her.
And it's a
reminder of
what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says wherever you are,
death would come to you even if you
are
in
even if you're in lofty
towers.
And as we still are coming to grips
with the death of our beloved Sheikh Mushfiq,
who died simply a year older than Jihad,
We realized that
our mortality,
the only thing promised to us after we
enter into this life is the end.
That's the only thing that is promised to
us.
And the promise of Allah
encourages and encourages and encourages
us to remember death. Rasulullah
Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam says,
constantly remember the destroyer of delights.
And Rasulullah
he tells us
that
he drew a line in the sand.
And he said that this is the of
the son of Adam. This is the hope
of the son of Adam.
And then he drew around it a rectangle,
and he said, and this is his.
The
lifespan
is cutting off that person's hope.
Our dream is to live
10 years in the future, 20 years in
the future, 50 years in the future. But
we have something that cuts us off from
that protracted hope, and that is
our lifespan.
And
then drew other lines and he said, and
these are the calamities that befall a person.
If one misses them, another strikes them.
A person loses a family member. A person
loses wealth. A person loses health. A person
loses all sorts of things.
And our life becomes diminished
by the problems that we experienced in the
dunya before our life is ended and we
meet
Allah This dunya was never meant to be
a place of perfection.
And so people experience incredible distress when they're
expecting this dunya to be a place of
perfection. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala did not design
this dunya to be that place. Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala
designed
to be that
place.
Allah
says, rather you prefer this life, but
the is better in its quality, and it
is more lasting.
And who he says,
I never saw anything
that is certain about which there is no
doubt
that people take as if it is doubtful.
There's no certainty in it like death.
I've never seen anything that's more certain.
That people act like it's not going to
happen to them
than death.
We're aware of it, but yet we assume
that it's going to happen sometime in the
distant future for every single one of us.
So I'd ibn Abi
Talib, he gave a hootba, and he said,
He said, the thing that I fear the
most for you are 2 things. Number 1
is
protracted hope
protracted hope. A person just assumes that they're
going to live
into the future that they're imagining.
And
and following their desires. He
says, As for
protracted hope, it makes a person forget about
the hereafter.
You're talking to me about Jannah and the
hellfire and the grave and all of these
types of things. That's so far off from
me. I'm young.
I'm healthy. I'm okay.
And as for
as for following your desires,
it distracts a person or it diverts a
person away from the truth.
And then he says, As for
the hereafter, it is approaching.
And this life is departing. As soon as
we entered into this life,
we started approaching the hereafter.
And the dunya continues to depart from us.
Every year that we experience, every tomorrow that
we see, Al Hassan al Basri has another
quote where he says, oh, son of Adam,
you are by a number of days. Every
single one of us is a collection of
days. That number might be hovering over our
heads. We don't know. But he says
that every time a day departs,
a part of you departs as well.
And so Ali says, the dunya is and
the
is approaching. So be of the children of
the and don't be of the children of
this dunya because
every single one of them will be followed
by its inhabitants. Every single one of us
every single one of them will be followed
by their children.
Rasulullah Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam he says
in the.
He says there are the heart of an
old man
stays young when it comes to 2 things.
Number 1 is,
the love of the dunya. And number 2
is,
protracted hope. The the wish for a long
life.
No matter where we reach in life, we
hope that we're still going to be able
to experience
my children's wedding. Then I'm able to experience
my children's wedding. I wanna see my grandchildren's
wedding. That's the nature of being human.
But the wise person is the one who
doesn't let that desire divert them from doing
what they need to do and to recognize
that
told all of us.
Every single one of us, he says, be
in this world like you were a traveler
or someone who's simply passing by. And the
traveler is always remembering
their journey that they're going to take.
When a person is
at the airport and they're transiting in the
airport, a lot of people might walk to
their gate just to make sure that their
gate is there. I don't wanna miss my
trip that I'm about to take.
They don't lounge in the airport and and
forget about the departure.
Similarly,
we are in this station of transit
at an airport somewhere that's called earth. And
a person shouldn't get so distracted
by what's available here that you forget about
the departure that you inevitably are going to
be summoned to. The prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam
reminds us of the importance
of remembering death and we don't do it
out of a sense of morbidity. It's not
because that we are a morbid people that
we're always talking about death or that we're
encouraged to remember death a lot. But because
remembering death makes a person
urgent about life, They don't take life for
granted. I have today. Imam Al Ghazali, he
says that false expectation is caused by 2
things, ignorance and love for the dunya.
As for ignorance, it's because you assume that
you have some sort of immunity to death.
That it's something that for some reason or
other won't touch you even though you've known
people who've died since you've known life. In
primary school, people died. In secondary school, people
died. In college, people died. In university, you
might have had peers that died. At every
station of your life, you might have known
people who died. And yet, a person is
ignorant if they feel that
all of these times that death comes to
those who they know, that it will never
come to them until they are absolutely ready
yet. Allah says
spend in the path of Allah before death
comes to you. And when death comes to
a person, he says, oh my lord, give
me delay.
Let me give charity and be of the
righteous. And Allah
says, but he never gives anybody delay. When
death comes, if you're not ready, then
you're not ready. But death is never delayed
for a person. And so the only thing
that a person can do is to make
sure that they're ready all the time.
That they are not diluted
by their youth, that they're not diluted by
their health, they're not diluted by anything.
How many a healthy person died without any
cause of death?
Without any defect? Without any illness?
And how many a
sick person lived for an extended period of
time. So we ask Allah to grant us
all good endings.
I wanna end with a post from Rihaab
that I started with, and she said, a
lot of people talk to me about surviving
through this and having the will to live.
I just want them to know that our
goal is not to live. Our goal is
to live with meaning. I want them to
know that if our goal was to live,
none of us would reach that goal.
Allah
says, the death from which you flee will
surely overtake you, then you will be sent
back to the knower of things, secret and
open, and he will tell you of the
things that you did. And coming to terms
with the fact that we cannot flee death
should
focus our sights on the real eternal
life. We ask Allah, Azzawajal, to have mercy
on our dead. We ask Allah, Azzawajal, to
have mercy on our parents as they raised
us while we were young. We ask Allah,
Azzawajal, to heal our sick. We ask Allah
that he protect our families and protect our
loved ones over every earth and under every
sky. And to make the best of our
days the day that we meet him.