Hamzah Wald Maqbul – Remember Me Part 1 MSA Midwest OSU 03012020
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AI: Transcript ©
First of all, I wanted to thank the
NSA Midwest Corp Conference Organizers
for
affording me this opportunity to,
speak.
Even though it may look like I'm an
extra from Lord of the Rings,
but,
I actually was myself
I'd like to believe not too long ago,
although to be fair, it has been a
while. I actually myself was, an MSA member.
I was also the president of our MSA.
We did all sorts of,
all sorts of things. It was a very
important time in our life.
And,
you know, I count myself as one of
those few
select and elect
MSA for life members.
Some people may find that sad, but I
don't care.
Why? Because it was a good time.
It was a good time in our life.
It was a time when we used to
wake up and we used to go to
sleep.
We used to pray,
we used to work,
we used to think, plan, meet people, make
friends, and even make some enemies for the
sake of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
If you look at this room,
although it seems like we're kind of at
the midday low,
in terms of attendance. But if you look
at this room, inshallah, when it's at its
best.
The believers are described as those who listen
to what's said, and then they follow and
they focus and they concentrate on the best
of it. That when this room is at
its peak, when it's shining, when it's full,
when everybody is here at their rapt attention,
you will see
a
snapshot of this community not as it is,
but as it should be.
Not as it is, but as it should
be. Because if you go back to our
masajid,
if you go back to our Jannah'at,
you will see people are divided by race,
you'll see people are divided by socioeconomic
status, you'll see people are divided by,
ideological
orientation.
You'll see people will find any excuse to
divide themselves,
but when you're in the NSA,
that's not what's happening.
You meet each other and you separate from
each other for the sake of Allah ta'ala.
When the time comes to pray, you all
pray together.
You are what the community should be and
what it needs to be, and I'm proud.
I'm proud. Any just that I have toward
that, I'm proud of it. And I can
confidently say,
any of any organization
in the United States of any significance, all
of it started from the,
from the NSA. And there's a lot of
work yet to be done.
So
moving beyond that,
I was invited to speak at,
MSA West,
which is like MSA Midwest but with bad
bad weather.
I was invited to speak at MSA West,
which was an organization that many of the
attendees there probably didn't know I was one
of the, like, first members of when I
was in university,
about a topic that's similar to what I
wanted to share with you today.
Brother Omar, he asked me if I could
come and speak here, and without hesitation, I
said yes for the reasons we mentioned.
But then, like, you know, when you go
to a car rental place, most of you
are probably too young still, like, you're under
25, so then we'll give you rental
car without, like, you know, paying extra bond
or insurance or whatever. Right? But what happens,
you go to a car rental place if
you're cheap or broke, like, you know,
the
the the intellectual class,
you'll rent, like, Hyundai Accent. Right? Because it's
cheap.
And then you're like, well, it's not cheap.
It's gonna take less gas. I'm not gonna
be going anywhere with that 120 miles. Right?
So every every so often, you get to
the get to the front counter, and they'll
see, you know, we're out of Monday accidents.
The only thing we have left is the
Jaguar.
The only thing we have left is the
best. The only thing we have left is,
like, the escalator, the escapade, or whatever. You
know? And so this kinda happened for you
guys, which is what brother Omar asked me
to come and speak.
And
again, without
that.
By the father of Allah Allah,
Sheikh Hashim Ahmed,
was coming to visit us.
And, he will be up on the stage
to speak very shortly. I'm going
to basically yield whatever part of time I
had inshallah for his talk. Sheikh Hassan was
a very interesting person. And this ties in
actually with what I wanted to say and
what I said when I was speaking to
MSA West. That he was born some somewhere
around 7 years ago in Cleveland, and he
accepted Islam in the sixties,
as a kind of culmination of the process
of being a hippie.
You guys know what a hippie is. Right?
Woodstock, all that other stuff. He was a
musician,
and, he
lived in, Southern California, which is incidentally
decades later where I would be born and
grow up.
And
who here, like, you know, like, rich and
famous people, they're all really happy. Right?
No.
None of them are happy. Most of them
will kill themselves before they reach the age
of 30.
By commission or omission, God overdose something or
another.
This is what ends up happening. Right?
Anyone here over the age of 35?
Someone in the back. You guys remember Nirvana?
Anyone know what Nirvana is? Like, not the
Buddhist concept of enlightenment, but the back.
Right? Kurt Cobain. It's saying every generation, like,
just like Jimmy Hendrix went straight after this.
Alright. Just like that Kurt Cobain.
He was on top of his
career. He was on top of the world.
He's actually married. He had a family, everything.
He took a 12 k shotgun, put it
in his mouth, and blew his brains
out. Why? It's the natural culmination of a
process of realizing that this world is dunya
is it's empty. There's nothing there. And many
of us will spend our lives and learn
that lesson
when at the end of the line,
Because we never had
it. Those people who have it, they feel
that emptiness and it's really depressing when you
look for something your whole life and you
and you don't know any other goal other
than that. And you finally attain it,
and you realize that there's nothing there either,
then the whole existence becomes very empty very
quickly, very suddenly.
But what's the problem? You're like, a girl
with a double jeopardy.
Because on the other side, if you make
that realization, if you're fortunate, you're lucky, it's
very interesting. This is a
very great treasure and prize Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala has given us. And we receive it
for free. And oftentimes, people who receive
a gift for free, without having to work
hard to get it, they don't appreciate it.
And that's what the likeness of many of
us who are born into,
into the legacy of Islam.
You know, that's many of us our situation
and our our describe this very well.
And so what happens is once you embrace
that,
you don't you don't want the duty anymore.
You don't want any of these things anymore.
What is happening?
The world turns on you. The
Rasulullah, I mean,
they love him.
The police loves him.
You know, he was the one who settled
their disputes and they were happy with the
settlement. He was the one who was his
own of all kinds. They were getting ready
to kill each other for the privilege. And
they yielded it to him that they carried
it to get carried the black stone together.
He's the one who put a bag in
space on the cow that was being remodeled.
He turned his back on the on the
new near of the people, and he started
to say, the hop in what happened. All
of a sudden, literally literally the nicest person
in the world. Will not have ever created
and will ever create.
They all turn on him.
What happened with all of those people all
of those people in every generation including this
one, including you in your own home, amongst
your own relatives?
Forget about, like, you know, like,
you know, Hitler and Stalin and all these
your own relatives, what's gonna happen?
You start you start to bring the happiness
to your left, people are gonna resent it.
They're going to turn on you. Some of
them will win their lesson eventually, some of
them never will.
But there's a lot of difficulty. And so
this is the ones I don't wanna wrap
this up because shit is just a creative
use comment. I don't wanna pin down this
time too much more. But the one, small
thing I wanted to share with everybody, which
I shared with, the NSA West at the
conference when I spoke there, and the year
after then, Sheikh Hassan even spoke there,
is what?
If you say the truth, if you turn
your back on this dunya, if you work
for justice, if you work for what's right,
if you work to tell people about,
you know, their actual purpose in living is
Allah. There's a lot of people who are
not gonna like it. There's a lot of
people who are making a lot of money
and a lot of people who have a
lot of political power, and a lot of
people who have a lot of influence
based on maintaining the illusion that none of
that stuff exists.
And literally, economies will collapse if people
turn away from Baffel and Ford Hach, and
they're gonna resist it.
And those people are smarter than us, they're
more hard working than us, as hard as
it is to believe, some of them are
even prettier than us.
Right?
How are you going to overwhelm those odds?
There are definitely way more of them. They're
like an army of zombies.
There are definitely way more of
it. How is it that you're going to
succeed in this? Whoever says that, you know,
hide the law, how is that person who's
going to succeed in the the path in
front of him that Allah asked him for?
Rasool Salazar said put it out. What does
he say? Say it Allah.
And then b and then b,
you know, be steadfast in that path. Why?
Because we have a lot of talk about,
you know, practicing Islam like minority. Right?
With all due respect,
this is my own humble, seen opinion
with all due respect. Imagine there is a
position that you have or some sort of
characteristic or attribute that you have. You're the
only one in the creation that has it.
It's you and Allah that's it.
You're on the opposite you and Allah. Tell
me, it's you and Allah and all the
rest of the creation on the other side.
Who's the minority?
Who's the minority?
If Allah if you're on the same side
as Allah Ta'ala, you're never the minority.
And the hudjah of Allah Ta'ala against his
creation is that the Bedi sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam literally, he came down off the mountain
alone.
Even say that Jibril wasn't with him, even
if he was with him, no one could
see.
He was literally
the
He was an orphan of Belohashi, and he
came off the mountain alone, and the world
had to bear witness that this man brought
something of of importance.
So, you know, you're young people, you're in
the MSA, this is not time for weak
risk and weak sauce.
This is not time to give speeches about
being be easy. You know, the deed is
easy.
This is not the time to lower people's,
him not in courage.
This is the time to fill your eyes
and your hearts with what can happen.
What can be, the way the world can
be.
This is the time to fill your hearts
with these things.
And don't let the person who says it
cannot be done, stand in the one who
in the way of the one who's doing
it.
I know this. I'm saying this on my
way out because I was even when I
was I was saying there's so many things
people say, oh, you wanna do this? Can't
be done. Can't be done. You should bother
me. I said, if you're not doing it,
why are you telling me it can't be
done? And it would happen. Now I find
myself retreating into the gloominess of old age.
And I just wanna tell people, like, I
wanna tell kids who have an idea. I
was you can't do it. Sit back. It's
a waste of time. You're tired of so
hot.
She's gonna go sit at home and and
watch YouTube videos of KittyCats.
This is your youth. Try it. Even in
your failure, you'll learn something. You'll do something
great. You'll do something better. You'll change the
world for the better. You'll change this America
for the better. People will name their children
after you because you're the one who brought
Hidayah. You brought guidance into these streets that
people are, like, you know, abusing meth and,
you know, uh-uh, entertaining themselves to death and
living and dying without any purpose.
Great things. You know, your goal is bigger
than just becoming a doctor. I know everybody's
not all of you will become doctors as
well, you know?
I was gonna be a doctor too, Mashal.
I got the I got the 99th percentile,
score in impact. And by the time it
was actually time to apply to medical school,
I lost so much interest because I wanted
to study Dean. Okay. Don't do what I
did. Otherwise, your parents are going to say,
don't invite this guy to conference anymore. All
of you will become doctors, but that's just
a stepping stone. You have so much more
in front of you then. So with that
in mind, I will I've already taken too
much time. I will yield the floor to,
Sheikh Hashem,
who is, our learned elder. The first time
I met him, by the way, he's not
inshallah. He's gonna come back to America, but
he's right now actually
born and raised in Cleveland
in in 1950. Right?
And, he lived most of his life in
the Muslim world. He's currently resident in what
or actually Pakistan, which is where I first
met him, when I was studying Dean, overseas.
And he, between what decade in in the
Hadid Sharif, the and
traveling to different parts of Africa and, Asia,
the Indian sub continent to study,
studying with some of the the greatest alama.
He's actually opened the books of hadith. You
know, in the old days, they used to
Unbroken chain of narration. He's taught Bukhari and
taught these books, from beginning to end, and
all of the books below it in the
in the syllabus,
with an unbroken chain. You can ask him
if you want. Maybe he'll give you, a
a hit, you know, like as a like
example at Costco, you know, with an organization,
you can be part of that blockchain as
well for decades.
But what? He saw the seventies. He saw
that age in which, like, you know,
all of us couldn't sit at the same,
lunch counter or drink from the same water
fountain.
Let me tell you something you wanna know
about, like, civil rights and about the,
not moving from the same water fountain?
The people who,
you you know, perpetrated all of these injustices,
some of them are still alive and still
like like to remember those as the good
old days.
A day will come when the believers will
bring from the humble of the prophet
which function will they drink from on that
day?
Allah,
so this is a rare honor, inshallah.
To, give some words of benefit, and please
forgive me for taking from your time.