Hamzah Wald Maqbul – Khutbah Patience Is An Action Hira 031102023
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of patient mindset and the concept of Sabr, which is a module of patience. They emphasize the need for people to make choices based on their experiences and seek help from Allah through prayer. The multi generational process of civilization is also discussed, with a focus on acknowledging the fight against hate and finding oneself a path that aligns with one's values. The speakers emphasize the benefits of fasting, including increasing understanding of success and achieving great things, and stress the importance of planning for the future and achieving goals.
AI: Summary ©
Continuing
with
the theme of topics
leading up to Ramadan in order to understand
what the point of the fast is,
to let it transcend from being just some
cultural observance,
that is at times,
an excuse to eat food,
and at times an excuse to have parties,
and at times an inconvenience that one wishes
was over, that one counts the days in
order to finish,
and to actually see what the point of
the
fast is,
To transcend what the Messenger of Allah Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam described
as how many a person who is fasting,
they receive nothing, they get no benefit from
their fast except for hunger and thirst.
We talk about the idea of sabr, of
patience.
That the Rasool Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam describe fasting
as half of patience.
What is the point of patience?
Patience is a cardinal virtue. Most people
take it.
To mean
suffering
when a person has no other option.
And indeed, this is a great module of
patience.
There are
so many things in life we don't get
to choose.
There are so many things that we don't
get to choose about our own health. You
don't get to choose your parents. You don't
get to choose your family members.
You don't get to choose the day that
you were born.
And
for most people, you don't get to choose
the day that you die.
The people who do
try to choose it for themselves
oftentimes also run into other difficulties in this
world and the hereafter.
The idea is there are so many things
in life that you don't get to choose.
And there are so many things in your
life that you do.
And the model of patience,
when discussing those things that you don't get
to choose in your own life.
Do you have a faulty copy of a
particular gene?
Were you at the quote unquote wrong place
at the wrong time?
Obviously, there's no wrong place and wrong time
because Allah chooses all times in all places.
But would it have been a time and
place to be in that you would prefer
to have missed
had the choice been yours?
You don't get to choose those things.
And so, yes, the saber,
the patience in those things
has to do with what? It has to
do with keeping your mind and your heart
intact
and powering through
with your life,
with your iman,
with your desire, determination to go on intact
and not to allow those things to shatter
you.
Not to take the burden on yourself about
those things that you have no choice in.
This, however, is only 1 module of patience.
It's not
most patients and it's not
the greater module of patience and it's not
the module of patience that you are
exercising when you fast,
ideally.
Rather, look at the way
the word sabr and its root is used
in the Quran.
Quran.
Seek help from Allah
This is not something that happens to you.
This is something actively that you're doing. Ista'inu,
seek help from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
with patience and through the prayer.
Again, by rational analogy from the siyak of
the kalam, from the context of the words.
It's an active process.
Your patience is something that you decide to
do. It's something that you're doing actively.
It's not something that's thrust on you without
your choice.
Allah ta'ala is commanding,
Take this choice, make this choice, seek help
from Allah
through patience and through the prayer.
And know that that is a difficult thing
to do except for the people who fear
Allah ta'ala.
Those people who know that there's a day
that's going to come,
that they're going to meet their Lord.
And
they know that indeed there's a day that
they're going to return to Him.
Allah ta'ala says in his book,
Command your family
to the salat.
Command your family, your wife. Yes, the wife
that doesn't listen to anything you say. And
the children that don't listen to anything you
say, that family.
Command your family to the salat.
And
be steadfast therein.
Make the choice, and don't give it up.
So many things in life are battle of
wills.
There is no law that can be that
can be overturned by steadfastness and through stubbornness
of people.
There's no battle that cannot be won through
the steadfastness and the stubbornness of a people.
There is no
difficulty that cannot be overcome
if people have enough steadfastness and enough
stubbornness that they're not going to move from
the thing that they choose to do, that
they choose to want, that they seek after.
Civilization, brothers and sisters, is a multi generational
process. It doesn't just happen in a week,
It doesn't happen in a month. It doesn't
happen in a year. It doesn't happen in
a lifetime.
There are certain
types of patients
that are mutawadif. They're literally inherited from father
to son
until victory is achieved, until victory is attained.
If I were to talk about these things
with examples from our own Ummah, maybe the
mustard administration will start to get nervous and
maybe I won't
be here to give you a Friday khutbah
again. So we'll use a non Muslim example.
I grew up hearing stories about the Vietnam
War,
And when I was in school,
it was relatively closer to when the Vietnam
War happened in this country.
As you can tell, the news you get
when something is going on is very different
than what you hear 20 years later, 30
years later, 40 years later, which might even
be different than what actually happened.
But usually, the later report that's more distanced
is closer to what actually happened than the
one that is happening at the time, which
is mostly propaganda.
So when I grew up, all the football
coaches in high school, yeah, we won the
Vietnam War, we didn't win the Vietnam War.
There was no war to fight, the whole
thing was on a pretense, It was a
complete fools
errand. And the sad thing is that there
are people, our neighbors and people who live
around us, who really believe
in the project of America, and believed in
their homeland, and wanted to do what was
best for it, and they allowed the silliness
of their politicians, the lies that they say,
creep into their head until they went and
wasted
significant parts of their lives and parts of
their physical and mental health on this war.
Vietnam was not a country to fight against
America. Do you understand what I'm saying?
Much like many places in the Muslim world,
technologically backwards,
uneducated,
unmodern,
and definitely lacking enough resources financially, militarily, economically,
politically to even make this a fight that's
classifiable as a fight.
Ken Burns at a PBS documentary about the
Vietnam War which was
made with a significant amount of hindsight and
told things that we weren't told when we
were growing up reading about this in American
history in high school.
One of the most moving things that I
read that I that I sort of heard
in that documentary was there was a an
interview with a Viet Cong soldier. Now get
get this,
We're all Americans. We all live here. If
we don't like the place that we come,
that's just our own bad. That's like stupid
for ourselves. I was born here. I like
living here. I personally choose not to live
anywhere else. And only a fool would not
have their own home
in mind, its best interest in mind. However,
you can recognize that somebody else has some
sort of virtue in them even if that
person is your enemy.
I don't consider the Vietnamese people to have
ever been our enemy, by the way. I'm
just saying I'm not glorifying them either.
Vietcong communist, the ideology is very messed up
in my opinion. I'm just saying human beings
are human beings. If one particular thing someone
does or says is admirable, it's okay to
acknowledge that.
They interviewed a Viet Cong soldier,
and they asked him, What brought you into
this fight? What made you fight against the
Americans?
He said, I had 5 older brothers
that fought the Americans because they said, this
is our homeland, we don't want to be
ruled by foreigner.' 1 by 1, every single
one of them was killed. When the last
of the 5 was killed, my own mother
came to me and said, Now it's your
turn.
Tell me, what is this?
This is patience.
If this is the patience that a probably
illiterate woman
in a village in the middle of Vietnam
who's fighting for communism, which by its very
definition
is an atheistic and godless ideology.
That doesn't make sense and it doesn't work
either.
None of the things that it's ever tried
to achieve in a society have ever been
successful at all.
If this is the type of saber that
this woman can have for that or for
the pride of her own people,
her own nation.
Imagine the person who wishes from Allah
That you feel pain like other people feel
pain.
But you have hope with Allah ta'ala for
those things that people have no hope for.
They gave up hope for it.
Their maximum
definition of success, all of it will end
in the dirt or end in a crematorium,
spread ashes on Lake Michigan.
Where's the summer?
The same summer that allows a person not
to be able to keep a diet, not
to exercise, not to save up enough money
to buy a house and then say, shit,
can I get a mortgage from so and
so company because you know if you rent,
you know, you throw your money away and
but which is not all a 100% true,
but whatever, and like, you know, and this
is impossible to It's not impossible? People do
it.
Those sons of capital have been
collected by Muslims in America.
That the doctors and engineers couldn't collect are
Somali brothers, refugees. All of them uneducated, all
of them without degrees when they first came.
11 Insha'Allah.
They're the ones who's collected sums. Why? Because
they put their mind to the task. They're
patient. It takes a long time to pull
off an important plan.
Like I said, some sabr is multi generational.
It's a vision that's passed from fathers to
sons.
This is how Islam
reached the afaq.
This is why to reach the horizon. This
is why the conquest of the companions radiAllahu
anhu,
geographically, and by population, by headcount,
were greater after Rasulullah salallahu alayhi wa sallam
passed from this world than they were during
his lifetime.
They could do the conquest but they couldn't
make the vision and they couldn't teach the
patients.
That's why the Messenger of Allah Sallallahu Alaihi
Wasallam among so many other reasons.
He is not only the greatest of this
ummah, he is the greatest of Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala's creation.
The point of fasting is not to say,
Dang it.
Another year is up.
Muslims are very fervent about their religion. My
family is gonna get upset at me, so
I guess I may as well give up
eating for a couple of hours because I
know I'm gonna pig out and eat more
later on.
No, my friends, the fasting itself is a
gift. It's a benefit. There's something very good
in it. It inculcates, it cultivates, it hones,
and it sharpens inside of a person
a particular attribute, which is itself a key
to success,
which is the understanding
that great things are achieved when you put
time into them.
Your enemy might have a nicer watch than
you, but you have the time, time is
on your side.
Why is it?
What does this mean?
It's not a video game.
In the end, everything belongs to the people
who fear Allah
Whether their caliphate was glorious or it never
came together.
Whether they won the battle or whether all
of them died on the battlefield,
whether the thing they saved money for they
were able to buy, or whether
the plan fell apart, someone cheated and left
with all the money.
The idea is what sabr is the operationalization
of this idea
that things are achieved through putting time into
them.
That your enemy might have a nicer watch,
but as long as you have the time,
you will win every single time.
This is the point of fasting, and it's
not only there for one
month out of the year.
This is a way of looking at life,
this is a vision for the future, this
is a vision for our community,
Do not just look at the corporatization.
Many of you have corporate jobs. The way
I know that is if I go over
a couple of minutes, I start getting weird
looks,
People all of a sudden become annoyed with
me.
Why? Because you're a slave, your master wants
you back. Why? Because they have a machine
that sees which time you come in and
which time you come out of.
They have a machine that counts how much
money did we make today, how much did
we make yesterday, and they projects what a
person is going to make tomorrow.
Somehow or another, all of this planning fails
to encapture the idea
that if you keep having rapid runaway growth
year over
year, then your model is cancerous.
The earth is gonna run out of resources.
It's gonna run out of air. It's gonna
run out of water. It's gonna run out
of land.
And when all of that's done, even if
you have a $1,000,000,000,000 in the bank account,
you cannot breathe money, you cannot eat dollars,
you cannot drink them. They don't replace a
loved one. There's a type of greater logic
that's missing in all of this.
This is an opportunity to think about and
to reflect over those things. And this is
an opportunity to achieve and attain those things
that you wouldn't have been able to achieve
or attain even when you are well fed
and well hydrated.
Even when you're well fed and when you're
well hydrated.
Why? Because just to go about your day
requires you to have a little bit more
saber.
Because your head hurts more than it normally
does, so you have to work a little
bit harder.
Your muscles are a little bit weaker than
they normally were, so you have to work
a little bit harder.
Your energy levels are a little bit lower
than they were, so you have to work
a little bit harder. Then when you get
your hydration back, and your food back, and
your head doesn't hurt anymore, and you get
your energy level back, still the habit of
working harder, it's still there with you, you
got to keep it for the rest of
your life. And you know what the fun
thing is? Alhamdulillah,
Last several years, I didn't stop and I
didn't even reduce my workout while I when
I lift and when I walk and run.
I didn't reduce any of it during Ramadan.
I found that it's actually easier to do
when fasting. That's a completely different lesson. That's
not our topic for today that has to
do with the mothers of Allah. Allah tells
help when it comes down on a person.
It's also not a joke, and without it,
it also makes these
projects difficult to fulfill.
But with it, nothing becomes impossible. But perhaps
that's another discussion and another lesson for another
time in another place. Allah
give us all patience, Allah give us more
from this fast than just hunger and thirst.
Allah Ta'ala make us amongst those people whose
fasting is accepted.
From amongst those people they are the mizdaq
of the kalamu rasool sallallahu alaihi wa sallam.
Salallahu
alayhi sallam. Mansama Ramadan imanuwati saban. Rufallallahumaatakaddamamunvanbihi.
The person who fasted the month of Ramadan
and faith in Allah Ta'ala,
and good expectation, good hope of reward from
him. Allah
will see that all of their sins that
came before are forgiven. May Allah write us
from the forgiven and from the accepted. WassaAllahu
ta'ala wa sallamalasidina
wahamadhanu wa salihajma'in.
So you can take a couple of minutes
to read your sunnah.