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 sallallahu alaihi wasallam is his
slave and his messenger
and his perfect worshiper.
To proceed,
a young woman
whose name was Rihaab al Buri.
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 Rihab,
we realize 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 Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam encourages
and encourages
us to remember death. Rasulullah
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam says,
constantly remember the destroyer of delights.
And Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
he tells us
that
he drew a line in the sand
and he said that this is the 'amal
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, 30 years in the future, 40
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 Rasulullah
sallallahu alaihi wasallam 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 experience 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.
Says,
rather you prefer this life, but
the is better in its quality and it
is more lasting.
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. And so Arid ibn Abi
Talib he gave a 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 jinn 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 Hasan 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 departing
and the akhirah is approaching, so be of
the children of the akhirah 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 Sahal Bukhari, 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
protractive 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 are 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 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
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 wa
sallam 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 Ghazari, 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, Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, he 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 Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says,
And Allah
says 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 Rahab
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 to have mercy on our
debt. We ask Allah to have mercy on
our parents as they raised us while we
were young. We ask Allah 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.