Hamzah Wald Maqbul – Khutbah That Perchance You May Fear God Hir 04082022
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Oh, praise to Allah. Give
us
the to reach this Mubarak
month of Ramadan. And we were not to
reach it had Allah
not brought us to it.
That fasting has been prescribed for you
as it has been prescribed for those before
you
so that you may learn the fear of
Allah
So that you may learn taqwa.
The concept of taqwa
is one that's unique
to the Arabic language
and to Islam.
The word fear doesn't do it justice.
Often, it is
translated in a more friendly sense
as god consciousness,
but that also doesn't do it justice.
Taqwa is a mode of remembering Allah
with the knowledge
that the Allah
that you are dealing with
created the heavens and the earth from nothing
and creates every single thing from nothing.
Not only could you not have been created
without him, you don't have the ability to
exist without him. Your existence is an active
result of his creation in every moment and
every instance.
And along with that, creative ability
is Allah ta'ala's ability to destroy as well.
It's Allah ta'ala's ability to harm as well.
It's Allah ta'ala's ability to punish as well.
But as I say, oftentimes people, they have
a
deficient way of looking at things. Every coin
has two sides.
Wherever there is something that's
very negative and very scary and very
discouraging and very
heartbreaking.
On the other side of that coin, you
have something that's very positive
and very encouraging
and very promising
and something that can give you inspiration.
The thing is, the reason you fear Allah
is
the same reason that you should love Allah
The reason that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can
destroy you, it's the same reason that he
can also make you.
The reason that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can
make a person who everything is working perfectly
for, good health, money, family, everything, he can
take it all away in an instant.
That's the same reason the person who has
nothing, who is completely broken.
Allah can give him also all of those
things.
All in one instant.
The idea of the taqwa of Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala, it's a mode of his remembrance.
It's a mode of his dhikr. The point
of it is not that Allah wants you
to
cower in fear, debilitated from being able to
do anything useful or beneficial in life, and
that that's the lot of every Muslim, that
you should live
a life of
wretchedness.
In fact, quite the opposite, Allah
revealed to his prophet
We did not
reveal this Quran to you. We did not
send this Quran down upon you
In order for you to be wretched,
in order for every day of your life
to be sad and to be devoid of
joy,
to be devoid of enjoyment, to be devoid
of happiness,
to be devoid of success or progress.
The only reason we sent it down is
as a reminder for the one who fears
Allah
And again,
the same reason that you fear Allah is
the same reason that you have hope in
Allah
And the greater the fear is, the greater
the hope is. And the fact of the
matter is both
hope and fear are mercies from Allah
Not everybody responds only to positive encouragement.
Not everybody only responds to positivity.
If you're late in paying your bills,
if you're late in paying your rent, and
every time you were late paying your rent,
your landlord said, here, you know what? Just
don't pay anymore. Are you gonna pay next
month? No one's gonna pay next month.
There are a few people who are gonna
pay next month, but mostly nobody's gonna pay
next month.
There are certain things
through negativity,
you receive benefit. You receive tarbia. You receive
ta'afi. You raise in your rank.
You make progress
as a human being. You make pro progress
physically.
If you sit on the couch,
no pain. But do you make progress? No.
You actually decline.
If you go to the gym and work
out or you take a a
a 10 mile run or a 10 mile
hike,
will you be broken by the time you
get home?
Most of us, probably.
You know you're tough you guys are tough
guys. I know you're probably maybe a 100
miles, then you'll get tired. Right? The rest
of us the rest of us, you'll be
broken when you get home. But if you
keep doing it,
what happens? That's how you make progress.
But these two things are both there for
our benefit. They're both there for our benefit.
Allah says,
la'ala is a particle in the Arabic world,
where in the Arabic language,
in which there is hope expressed for something
to happen,
and that thing is possible.
So Allah is expressing both that you will
learn Taqwa through this fasting, that it's possible
that you learn Taqwa through this fasting.
However, as a peculiar
use of the Arabic language only to Allah,
ta'ala.
La'ala,
when the created things, when human beings use
it in speech,
it expresses a hope of something possible.
But la'ala, whenever it's mentioned in the Quran,
this is like a a a a rule
of tafsir,
That it means this will definitely happen. Why?
Because Allah
That his affair can be described as nothing
else except for if he wishes for something,
he says to it, be it. It is.
Meaning, you will if you fast properly, you
will learn the fear of Allah And
this is something that I wanted to remind
myself in the brief amount of time I
have and remind others. That the point of
your fasting
is not
so that you learn to sympathize with the
poor.
That happens by the wayside. If you get
really hungry, then you look at another person
and say, oh, man. These people are hungry
every day. They may not have something to
eat or drink or whatever.
That's fine. You can benefit from that. That's
like a hikmah, a wisdom in it. You
can benefit from that, but that's not the
reason for the fasting. It's not been mentioned
to my knowledge in the Quran or in
in any of the hadith of the prophet
And the fact of the matter is in
this ummah, I see it with my own
eyes. There are people who they
open their fast by digging through the garbage.
I've seen it. I've seen it before so
many times.
And you should give to those people. You
should find those people. If you don't know
who those people are, you should look for
those people or find someone who knows who
those people are. You should give to them.
There's immense barakah and immense reward in in
in feeding such people.
But that's not the point of the fast.
The point of the fast is not so
that you can get your insulin levels down
and your blood glucose levels down.
It happens anyway.
Most of us manage to, like, mess all
of that up within, like, 30 seconds of
Istar.
Right? So don't do that.
But that's not the point. What's the point?
The point is that you may fear Allah,
you may remember
Allah. Remember, this is a common thread, that
the the
the
and the spirit
of every act of worship
in
the, including the salat,
including fasting,
including, giving zakat, including every single one of
the monastic of Hajj whether it be Dala,
or going back and forth between safa and
wallah, or stoning the jalaraf, or stabbing it,
alafa, whether it be taking the ihram, any
of these things.
The ruur,
the spirit which animates the otherwise dead body
of a ritual practice is what?
Is the remembrance of Allah
Is the remembrance of Allah
That you should remember Allah
The Arabs
were a mercantile people.
They used to do business, they used to
buy, sell, and trade.
And the Muslims also excel at trade.
Anyone who knows anything about the marketplace knows
that things,
their prices and their value operates on supply
and demand.
Just like outside of Ramadan,
people like to eat and drink,
people like to enjoy,
people like to go out and do things.
The demand for those things increases, so the
value inside the heart increases.
In Ramadan,
all of a sudden you cannot even drink
during the day.
All of a sudden, more people want to
come to the masjid.
You not not only do you have
a demand for 5 daily prayers,
you have demand on top of it for
20 raka'as of tawaweed.
On Eid, you have a demand for a
6th congregational prayer.
Right? Your friends at work, they're like, yo,
man. Yo,
Mohammed, what's wrong with you guys? Does your
guy your god is gonna give you a
break? Even on your holiday, you have to
come for a 6th prayer?
Say, listen, man. If you were getting what
we were getting, you would wanna come 6th
time as
well.
The demand goes up. All of a sudden,
the first stuff in the masjid that you
could have
prayed your salat in,
adisha by showing up 5 minutes early in
the Masjid. You have to come, like, half
an hour before, and you still might not
get a place.
The point of all these things is what?
If you remember Allah through all of these
things and any of these things,
you're benefiting.
If you don't remember Allah
I won't say it's a good duet of
benefit. Inshallah, there's prayer in all sorts of
things.
But you're on the way to your destination.
You haven't gotten there yet. You haven't gotten
there yet.
And all matters are to be judged by
their ends. If you haven't gotten there yet,
you're not there yet.
If your goal is to
I don't know. You're gonna go on vacation.
You're gonna fly to Los Angeles or to
New York or god god knows where, and
you're on your way to O'Hare.
If you just make it to Manheim
and say, look look how much progress I
made. And then you sit down at, like,
Dunkin' Donuts and have a a coffee and
walk home and pat yourself on the back.
Look how much progress I made. Yeah. It
is progress. You are closer than you would
be from here,
but you didn't make it yet.
Don't be so negative.
Like, oh, I'll never make it. You know,
I'm not trying to make progress. But on
the flip side, don't do it yourself in
the thinking you have something that you don't.
This is one of the reasons. Imagine, eating
and drinking is is jayas. It's not haram.
The other things that you're prohibited from in
fasting,
they're not haram.
Every time you have a remembrance, every time
you eat something, every time you start to
have a pang of hunger and you wanna
eat something,
what do you do? You remember Allah.
It's the same thing like in Hajj, for
example, you can't like, in in the Haram,
you can't
remove your hair. So people, like, with beards
or with long hair and things like that,
I tell them, like, be careful. Keep your
hands in your pocket or, like, you don't
hold your hands wide because if you go
like this and you pull the hair out,
there's gonna be a penalty. You're gonna have
to give salah for that. You're gonna have
to give a fidya for violating the rules
of
Iran.
Every every time someone I come back to
say, Sheikh, you know, like, months later, they'll
be like, you know, I'm, like, scared to,
like, even touch my beard or touch my
hair or whatever. Why? Because I think of
Iran. I mean, that's the point of the
whole thing is so that you remember Allah
Ta'ala,
that you're, like, somewhere, like, in some other
random month, you're, like, in, like, Ramiyah Thaniyah
next year, and And you wanna eat something,
you stop and say I'm fasting, but then
you're like, no. I'm not.
The point is not fasting. The point is
what? It's that you remember Allah
is with Allah at the same level. Allah
considers him to be the same level as
the person who is fasting and is patient
with his fast.
What's the qadar mushtaq? The the common denominator
between the 2 of them.
Is that both of them remember Allah
And so when you understand this, then you
understand that the fast has other things that
you have to worry about other than just
suhoor and Istar.
That if the point of the fast is
to remember Allah
then what will ruin it? What's the opposite
of remembering?
Forgetfulness.
Everything that will make you heedless of Allah
It's ruining your fast
in a way that's different than
than than than eating and drinking will ruin
your fast,
like the analogy of driving to a hare.
If you're driving and, you know, there's a
wild animal that's, like, scratching and biting you.
It may prevent you from going to O'Hare,
although it doesn't do anything to the car,
does it? The car working is one element
of making it there. You also have to
survive as well.
The car is like your body, the driver
is like your ruah. Your ruah, the the
sustenance it receives. Just like when you're fasting
and you're hungry, your body is devoid of
sustenance.
When you're eating your body, it receives sustenance.
When you're fasting, your ruh is receiving sustenance.
Your ruh is receiving nutrition. Your ruh is
getting stronger. Your ruh is building its endurance.
Your ruh is becoming illuminated.
It's shining with light.
What are you doing when you do things
like that that distract you, that cause you
to forget while you're fasting? You're killing the
rur even though the the car even though
the body is still fasting, you're killing the
the whole point of the fast.
For this reason,
this bandit, everybody, this
this like thief, every one of us that
we carry around with us in our,
this we carry around with us in our
pocket.
Be very careful about
it. Be very careful about it.
If you don't go on Facebook for the
next, like, whatever, 23 days,
trust me.
No one's gonna die. I promise no one's
gonna die.
If you don't go on Twitter
for the next 23 days, no one's gonna
die. If you don't go on TikTok ever
again, you'll probably become a better human being.
I'll go out on the living. Guarantee you'll
become a better human being.
The television at home,
the company that you chitchat, shoot the breeze,
all your relatives, all of your friends, they're
still gonna be there after Eid. I'm not
saying to cut off relations with them.
Talk for 5 minutes and then say, I
gotta go. I gotta read Quran. I gotta
do this. I gotta do that.
If you don't have the, you don't have
the capacity to do that, go home and
take a nap
so that at least when you go and
stand for, you're not sleeping, you can focus
better.
Do something useful for your time.
There are very few. They're just like a
a a number of days, a handful of
days. Everyone will be there afterward.
Everyone will be there afterward. And just like
if your friends and relatives people say, shit.
You're what Are you telling me to, like,
have bad o'clock with my friends and relatives?
No.
Just like imagine if your cousin came over
and said, hey. Don't go to work today.
Just hang out with me instead. You'd be
like, no. No. If I don't go to
work, I'm gonna lose my job, then I'm
gonna lose my house. It's like a dumb
idea. Right?
This is the same thing. This is literally
it's the same thing.
That That Allah there are certain number of
people that will be freed from the hellfire
in Ramadan,
and in one way the prophet says that's
every single night. The The majority of them
will be in the last 10. Fine.
But every single night, there are some people
who are gonna make I gotta make this.
I gotta do this because this is something
that's worse than getting evicted from my house.
It's it's important.
And then in Shawwal, we'll hang up.
Nothing wrong with that.
Anything that distracts you, anything that distracts you,
it's killing your your fast. Anything that causes
you to remember Allah
remember it, that's making your fast beautiful. And
I wanted to end with one point. This
is one of the things that we heard
from our, that which is the it's
the foundation of the entire deen.
People, when you ask them what is, they
say we will only worship 1 Allah. We
don't worship any Allah except for 1.
That also has a reciprocation as well.
What is the reciprocation?
That you also have to think of yourself
as,
I'm only for Allah.
I don't belong to my family.
I don't belong to my friends.
I don't belong to my country. I don't
belong to my
community. I definitely don't belong to my corporation
or to my boss at work.
Who do I belong to?
Only Allah
Whose happiness do I live for? Only Allah
Now, yes, this is true that Allah commands
us to be good to our family, our
parents, our relatives, our neighbors, the people in
our country,
etcetera, to be honest with our transactions, with
work, and things like that.
But inside of your heart, you have to
get the priorities straight.
Otherwise, a person should fear that the reward
of all of these things may be lost
to the point of all these things these
things may be lost. May Allah give us
from his fellow may Allah make this
in which our hearts are filled with and
with his remembrance in Baraka,
such a nur in Barakah that carries us
on the day
of
on the day of terrors and on the
way of day of calamities, when entire nations
will be burned in the garbage heap of
the hellfire, that every single one of us
be from those who make it from the
people of Salvation, from Najaf.