Husain Sattar – Working Hard
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In the Deen,
the basis of it or the foundation of
it is the fact that each of us
will be judged.
And that judgment actually will occur in context.
For example,
on one occasion,
the prophet was
sitting with his companions
And he mentioned to his companions that were
you to leave 10% of what you follow,
you would
leave the fold of what was Islam.
Meaning the Sahaba basically practiced the vast majority
of what the prophet
commanded him to commanded them to practice. Obviously,
their minds accepted everything,
but
basically, they were people
who
enacted
the vast majority of what the
prophet commanded them to do.
And then the prophet
he continued and he explained that there will
come a people
that if they practice 10%
of what I have brought,
they will remain within the fold of Islam.
Meaning that some place down in the future,
whether it be our generation or whether it
be some generation to come,
we will actually practice
10% of what the prophet brought.
And that 10% will be sufficient to keep
us in the fold of Islam or to
be called Muslim.
So you can see that
how much difference context makes.
One group of people is sitting with the
prophet
while he's being revealed before them. They watch
the crowning of the prophet
They're watching the victories of the battles between
them, etcetera.
And for
them, if they were to leave even a
tiny portion of what what was given to
them, they would have left what defined them.
And some place down the line, when the
context changes and the is no longer present
and people are so far away both in
time and place,
then practicing 10%,
practicing a minority
of what the sent
actually results in a great reward.
So context has a lot to do with
the way that we are judged
in the. Now
you have to understand that actually human beings,
they're designed like this.
I'll just give you some examples, and they're
actually very interesting examples.
Alright. Today is Sunday.
So we consider this the weekend.
Right? And psychologically,
once the weekend comes,
then all of a sudden everybody believes that
they should relax.
So there's this concept that I work during
the week,
and then once the weekend comes, I'm going
to take rest during the weekend, whether that
be Saturday, Sunday, or both days.
And that's what's ingrained in us. That's the
context in which we're raised. That's the context
in which we exist, and so that's what
we do.
Now when I was studying abroad, there was
no concept of weekend.
There was no such thing as weekend. There
was Jumuah,
which was a special day, and then there
was every other day,
Saturday, Sunday. There was no Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,
every day was the same.
So what happened? We used to work every
single day.
We used to I wouldn't know. The difference
between Saturday Monday, there would be no difference.
We would just work. So 6 days a
week,
we worked as if every day was equivalent.
And the day of Jummah would come,
and we would still work.
It's not that we took a break on
Jummah.
We would work, but we we work in
a different
way. Meaning, on this 5, 6 days we
were studying, we went to class, we reviewed.
And on Jummah, then we spent our we
woke up early, and we spent our day
getting ready for the prayer, whether it'd be
doing zikr, whether it'd be, preparing our clothing,
whether it'd be going to the masjid early.
And then once the day was over, we
actually begin to work again.
The day that that break, the, quote, unquote,
break of Jummah basically lasted until the prayer
because we were expected that we would be
back in school on Saturday morning and that
we would have reviewed our lesson on Friday
night after the Jummah prayer.
So for us, every day was equivalent.
And it was amazing that I had come
from this background where Saturday Sunday was automatically
a break. Right? And then all of a
sudden, that became completely erased because I was
in a totally different context.
And in that context, every day was equivalent,
and we used to work every single day.
And, actually,
that is what
led to the success of the people whose
who I studied with.
They were very successful people. I was just
an observer. I got to observe their success.
But in the end, they were very successful
people because they
grew up in this
they were raised to recognize that every moment
was valuable.
One time, I was sitting with,
and someone came and asked him. It was
a close person. Otherwise, he usually doesn't reveal
these kind of things. But someone came and
asked him that,
you know, how did you accomplish so much?
Now for those of you who are familiar
with him, you know, he's a engineer. He's
a half of the Quran.
He's a scholar.
He's very, very advanced, obviously, in his the
and the amount of that he must have
done to train to reach that state, the
amount of time he gives to people, the
amount of speeches he gives, the amount of
traveling he does. You just begin to wonder,
you know, like, how does one human being
accomplish so much?
So someone actually came and asked him. It
was very interesting because we would never dare
ask that question, but somebody came and asked
that we just got an opportunity to listen.
So he said that the reason we were
able to accomplish so much was because of
the circumstance that we created around us, the
context.
So somebody said, how? What do you mean?
So he said that, actually,
we used to have some rules.
And when we were in college, these rules
were engraved. They were, like, you know, as
if they were rules of the dean.
So rule number 1 was that there were
4 roommates 4 or 5 roommates living together.
They never spoke to one another.
They never spoke to one another. They were
just busy themselves in work. They would walk
in and say, salaam, ask how the other
person was doing, but beyond that, there was
no speech.
So much so
that in order to become efficient, they had
devised a system
that, you know, we need to cook because
they wouldn't eat food from the outside. So
they would eat their own food from inside.
They were all people who were all hardworking,
all people who were accomplished in their studies,
all people who were struggling and striving towards
advancing themselves in the dean. So what they
do used to do is they used to
put a schedule,
alright, that today, this person will clean, this
person will cook, this person will go bring
supplies, this person will have this task, and
they used to write it a month in
advance.
And it would be written on the door
in this very organized way so that no
one would even have to discuss who was
going to cook, what was going to be
cooked, who was going to go bring the
food, the the supplies to cook the food,
etcetera.
It was already known. It was written on
the door. Once a month, they would get
together. They would sit down, make a schedule,
and then they would follow that schedule.
So that was one thing that they used
to do. They created a context of seriousness
amongst themselves.
There was no room to discuss
because these were people who were working towards
a goal. You know, somebody is working towards
a goal. They don't have time to sit
and talk. The night before our final exam,
who has time to sit around and talk
on the phone? Nobody has time. You're worried
about the exam. You're worried about preparing for
the exam. It's a very different day. Right?
That day is different than every other day.
So in this way, they used to recognize
that every moment of theirs was as valuable.
So that was one thing.
Then he said that
the other thing
was that we didn't sleep very much. Now
what was interesting is that the questioner followed
up, said, well, then what did you what
do you mean you didn't sleep very much?
How did you decide? Like, what was your
schedule? He said there was no schedule.
When it came to our sleep,
we didn't have any schedule.
The rule was that you don't sleep until
you're dying of sleep.
That was the rule. There was no, okay.
It's 11 o'clock, so now I'm gonna go
to bed.
When we were passing out because we needed
to sleep, that was the time we used
to lie down.
And then we would sleep just as much
as we needed to sleep to refresh our
bodies.
And so, I'll tell you. I mean, I
don't have the kind of interaction that perhaps
some other people have just watching Sheikh Zulfikar
and spending time with him. But in the
minimal amount of time that I spent with
him and the time that I he stayed
with me or I've served him or I've
assisted him, I've never never seen him sleep
more than 3 hours,
alright, in a row.
So, I mean, he'll be up all night.
He'll be working on something. He'll have arrived
from the now think about this. Never more
than 3 hours, and where do I'm catching
him from flights where he's jet lagged coming
from here, coming from there. He's just been
in California speaking all night, meeting people. I
catch him here, and then he'll take a
nap for an hour, take a nap for
an hour and a half, not more. And
we try to make him sleep. You know,
we put him to sleep. We make the
bed as comfortable as possible. We fill up
his stomach if we can. It's because we
he's our guest. We want him to be
able to rest. So, you know, we tiptoe.
We close the door and we tiptoe. We
disconnect the phones. We purposely create the environment
that he could sleep. Now somebody creates that
environment for us, we'll sleep for 2 days.
Right? SubhanAllah, he would pop up.
He would get up in, like, half an
hour, an hour, and I would just look
at him and I would be shocked that
you got up. You know, what happened? Did
the phone ring? Did someone bother you? How
come you got up so quickly? Like, one
time I vividly remember that he spent the
whole night up meeting with people, talking to
people, people brought their questions, etcetera. Then he
went to sleep. It was probably around 9
o'clock in the morning when he went to
sleep. And I thought, for sure, he will
sleep till 1. 9:30, he was up walking
around. I was just looking at him shocked
that it just slept 20, 30 minutes, and
then all of a sudden he popped up.
So
that's because he had created within his
system,
and within an understanding of context. Right? Now
we have the same type of context, but
our context is already established. Everybody knows. My
doctor said I need 8 hours of sleep.
Right? So, automatically,
if I don't get 8 hours of sleep,
then I create the context in my mind
that I'm fatigued.
Right? I create that psychology within myself that
I'm fatigued.
Actually, the body doesn't need 8 hours of
sleep.
In in an hour or 2, you can
get what you need. Now maybe you need
a a hour or 2 or maybe 3
2 or 3 times in the day, but
you don't need 8 hours straight. People are
just bouncing in and out of room. But
he's a this is a sleep scientist. He
he runs a sleep lab. We can ask
him. People I mean, you can study these
things. You don't need that much sleep.
But what happens is is that we create
an understanding within ourselves
just like you don't need to rest on
the weekends. What is this resting on the
weekend business? Right? Well, we don't rest on
the weekends.
Somebody said to
one time we were sitting together, and they
said that, you know, you should rest.
That was that was a mistake. Right? But
he said you should rest. So he said
in that, yeah, I'll rest. We'll rest. He
said, no. He said we'll rest. We'll rest
in our grave.
That's the place where the Muslim rest. Mhmm.
It's like a rental. You know, you're you're
when you let's say that you have, you
run a business.
Alright?
And you know that you wanna rent a
van, right, for a day.
So what happens? You are a mover. Right?
So what are you gonna do? You're gonna
schedule all your appointments in that 24 hour
rental period. If you know that you're renting
you're a mover, you run a business, you're
a mover, and you have to rent a
van and you're gonna rent it for 24
hours, you're gonna tell everybody, I'll move you
at 1. I'll move you at 2. I'll
move you at 4. I'll move you at
6. I'll move you at 10. You're gonna
set your schedule so that that whole 24
hours gets maximized because you wanna take the
maximum return out of that car. It's obvious.
Any businessperson can understand this principle.
So it's the same with us.
This body is rented.
This body
Allah
gave us this body for a rental period
which is called life,
and this body will disintegrate.
And the goal is to see how much
you can churn out of this body,
what you can churn out of this body
in order to create a in order to
create some sort of reward for you in
the hereafter.
So now if we know that we've rented
this body and we have 50 or 60
years, then what is this sleeping
excessively
and resting on the weekend
and, you know, assuming that when a certain
hour comes and automatically I have to shut
myself off? These things don't exist in the
in the life of the Muslim.
In the life of the Muslim who understands
what this world is about and what work
is about.
Now from that,
you'll take home the general one principle, which
is what I wanna pass off to you.
And that is is that actually what you
have to engrain in your minds is that
you have to work hard in everything you
do
because that is what drives your context.
See, if you decide that I'm gonna work
hard in the dean, but I'm gonna be
a lazy person at work, then what's gonna
happen is that you will always be a
lazy person in everything you do.
The thing that I've noticed about those people
who succeed
is that they recognize their time as valuable
in every realm in which they apply it.
So,
I I can tell you that as many
accolades
that you have somebody, for example, that I've
seen even my teachers or whoever it might
be, just shaking Sheikh Zulfkar as an example,
as many accolades as I've seen him gain
in the deen,
he has similar accolades in engineering.
He has this award, that award. He used
to place, you know, top in his class
all the time when he was a engineering
student. Very regularly, he would be at the
top of his class. He'd attained various awards,
etcetera.
And that was because he recognized that whatever
he made a decision to do, he had
to work hard at that because he did
it in the context of Allah. And when
we go to work, we make a decision
that we're gonna go to work. We do
that in the context of the deen, to
make a halal income, to protect ourselves because
busyness is a good thing. When you're free,
that's when you begin to sin. Right? But
not but being busy is good, but not
being too busy, but not being, you know,
too free. So there's a balance. But, actually,
whatever you do, you have to work hard.
That's the that's the context that you have
to create. That individual who recognizes
that every moment of my time is valuable
and I have to work hard to make
that moment special,
then they work hard on the weekend,
sorry, on the weekday when they're at work,
and then they work hard on the weekend
when they're not at work. The person who's
lazy at work and then thinks that they're
gonna become people who strive in the dean
doesn't happen.
Doesn't happen. That laziness takes you over. Right?
1, you don't accomplish anything at work. Right?
An individual fails to accomplish what their goals
were in their whatever they might be pursuing.
And then 2, they begin to assume that
they need to rest even after their failure.
That's the worst thing.
One thing is to fail in what you
were supposed to do, right, and not meet
up to your goals that you set for
yourself. And then the second thing on top
of that is to compound it by saying
that now I'm gonna rest on Saturday Sunday.
Now I have to entertain myself on Saturday
Sunday. This is the day I have to
relax, so I'm gonna play my video games
on Saturday Sunday. Right? These are all things,
these ideas that chef on generates in a
person's mind in order to derail them. Because
the individual who becomes lazy on Saturday Sunday,
then they become lazy on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday. That's the way it works.
So if you want to be an individual
who succeeds in their endeavors and take everything
you do seriously,
when it comes to work, put 1,000 percent
in.
I'll tell you
very interesting that, a brother called me
just a few weeks back, maybe even less
than a week ago, and he told me
he's actually a lawyer.
And he told me that,
he was actually I'll tell you his history
a little bit. He's a lawyer, and he
was working on the East Coast. And then
he made a move to go outside of
the country, and he took a law job
outside of the country.
So when he took this law job outside
of the country,
he went to Sheikh Zulfikar.
And he said to Sheikh Zulfikar,
I got this new job. Can you give
me some advice?
Very interesting. So he said, I got this
new job. Can you give me some advice?
So Sheikh Zulfikar said to him,
work so hard.
You should work so hard
that the people at your job will wonder
if he leaves us, what will happen to
the company?
Just imagine,
he said you should work so hard at
your job. He's not even talking about his
dhikr, he's just talking about his job. He
said you should work so hard at your
job that the people at the company will
wonder that if you leave, where will we
be?
So SubhanAllah, he said that that had such
an effect on him
that he began to work so hard that
he would be there nights, he would be
there weekends, he would just constantly be working.
And within 3 months, they called him into
the office
and they said that we are so happy
with your performance that we're giving you a
40% raise.
So they gave him a 40% raise in
3 months.
It was just Ajib.
He was wondering how he could get such
a good position in a top level law
firm in another country. And within 4 months,
they're calling him into the office and saying
that we're so pleased with your performance that
we're giving you a raise on top of
that. Not even just a pat on the
back. It would have been enough. It would
we would have been ecstatic with a pat
on the back pat on the back. Instead,
they said, also, we're giving you a raise.
Meaning, we want to entice you to stay
here because where would we be without you?
That's the type of attitude he created with
them. Now what ends up happening is that
when an individual works that hard, then the
body gets used to working that hard. Then
when it comes to the weekend, when it
comes to free time, then that individual works
just as hard because they have that much
energy and they apply it to the dean
as well. And that's the individual who moves
forward.
That what they do, they do seriously and
they do with firm intent.
Of course, you have to always keep the
shidi on mind. So it's not like he's
missing salas. Right? Then people take it to
the extreme. They start missing salas and this
and that. That's not what we're talking about.
You go to the salah. You do your
salah on time. Pray your sunnahs. Come to
the masjid as much as possible,
etcetera.
But when you have that time, it's to
grab it and take advantage of it. Because
either you take advantage of your time, right,
then Allah
will take advantage of you.
He who takes advantage of his time, Allah
takes advantage of him. He uses that individual
to spread his deen, to share his deen,
to guide his family to the deen, to
benefit the community and the deen. And the
person who waste his time, Allah will waste
him. Makes no difference to Allah
The same way, you know, you go into
a room,
you have an ant problem,
you you you, you know, turn on the
spray the raid, and the more the ants
die, the happier you are. It makes no
difference to you, but the more you get
them, you're happier because now you got rid
of them. It's the same way. We're a
bunch of ants.
Right? The whole community could be wiped out.
What difference does it make to Allah?
How many communities have come? He's just
illuminated them, right, in in just a moment.
They disobeyed him. They wasted themselves. They did
not take advantage of the opportunity present before
them despite the fact that a prophet was
calling them clearly to a message.
Makes no difference to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
He just flips over the community in a
moment, finishes that community, and moves on.
So we should be people who will take
advantage of our time. We're lucky that we're
in the context that we're in because we're
already at the time of the prophet,
perhaps we would be the people that they
would be coming and giving dawah to.
Right? So we live in a context that
our our laziness
is acceptable.
Right? But it doesn't make it
the goal. So we should use our time,
use it wisely,
apply ourselves, and work hard at those things
that we take on as responsibilities towards the
need. Whether it be our, whether it be
our learning, whether it be our work, whether
it be our families, whether it be the
time that we spend with our families, etcetera.
That same energy should be applied in each
and every endeavor and that's what inshallah will
lead us towards success.
To be
among those who take advantage of every moment
and to be among those who apply ourselves
diligently in each and every endeavor that we,
take on.