Johari Abdul-Malik – Hajj Preparing For The journey
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the importance of Islam's message of responding to requests from Allah Subhan, emphasizing the need to be aware of one's actions and priorities to avoid confusion and chaos. They stress the importance of lightening one's load and avoiding excess and waste, and warn against becoming angry and not planning for the journey. The speaker also provides examples of individuals settling for Islam, including finding a way to achieve goals and being ready for the journey. The importance of knowing one's journey and taking responsibility and forgive others is also emphasized.
AI: Summary ©
Alhamdulillahrubilalamin
That Allah
has created for us a guide.
A guide in the Qur'an, and an example
of that guide in the life of the
Prophet Muhammad
That we might, if we would join in
that journey,
and live in the example of the Prophet
we would be successful
in our journey in this life
and in the hereafter.
Today I want to give you a short
reminder,
asking Allah's peace and blessings on the Prophet
and
on his family, and on his companions, and
on all of the NBA, and those who
follow the way of Allah's Haqq
until the day of judgment.
Something small
for us to think about.
And that is, walhamdulillah,
that
Allah has made some pronouncements
in the Qur'an,
and I believe,
subhanAllah, I believe because
of my background, my perspective,
I hear and I understand
the words of the Qur'an
differently
than people who grew up
in Muslim societies.
And I want to share that perspective
with you
to help you make dawah
to your neighbor.
You see, I understand your neighbor. I used
to be your neighbor.
Before I accepted Islam,
I was just an African American.
After I accepted Islam, I stopped being an
African American.
In fact,
when I go to the airport, I'm especially
not an American a lot of times.
I'm a Muslim.
But alhamdulillah,
I can tell you I'd rather have
the the badge that says Muslim
as a choice,
than to pick one of the brands, I'm
from Saudi Arabia, I'm from Egypt, I'm from
Sudan,
I'm from America. Alhamdulillah.
But the badge, the honor
is to be a Muslim
because
you respond to the call of Allah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala.
There are many people who have the label.
I grew up a Muslim. I grew up
in a Muslim country.
But when I think about something that Sheikh
Mohammed Al Hanuti
said to us the other week in in
our holocaust.
He said there are many words and concepts
from Arabic that when people hear them in
English,
or they they are processing them in French
or in German,
sometimes the meaning doesn't come through.
He said people talk about dhikr,
as an example.
You would say, okay, one of the names
of the Qur'an is a dhikr.
Maybe you think about,
your misbah, what do you do with your
hands? SubhanAllah, SubhanAllah, SubhanAllah, This is your zikr.
He said, think about
that element
as something
that is not
the the words or the action, but something
that moves you
along your journey.
So by way of of analogy, I might
say it this way.
If I am
making
zikr
to Allah,
then it affects
the way I do things.
Let me give you an example. I was
talking to my brother the other night, he's
somewhere here,
about
the speed limit.
When you're driving on your journey on the
highway,
if you are conscious
of the rules of the road,
you will drive the speed limit.
You'll drive the speed limit,
and you will drive the speed limit, mister
Yunus, all the time,
not just when you see the,
state trooper.
You are having,
and you are living and you are moving
the athkar
of a person who is on the journey
on a highway.
You're always
thinking about,
am I in the limit?
Because it means safety, it means security.
Not only for myself, but for others.
That's not the way we usually think of
zikr.
But Sheikha Hanuti says, if you are really
making
dhikr,
then to Allah it should have that effect.
That will propel you on your journey.
Hajj is
coming.
And Allah reminds us in the Quran,
so it's Hajj, 27th
ayah,
and proclaim
among people
the Hajj.
They will come on foot, and on every
lean camel, and from every remote path on
that journey they are coming.
They're coming to the house of Allah, and
they're coming saying,
Labayk
Allahumal
Labayk.
O Allah, I am responding
to your call on this journey.
That when I think about Allah, I'm on
this journey. I think about Allah
all the time. I know the talbiyah is
on people's tongues.
But when one is on the journey,
that telbia
has to be reflected
in your actions.
So if you're making Hajj,
you have to get in the state of
ekram.
So that while you are in that state,
you have a heightened awareness.
Okay, I'm in ekram. I can't clip my
fingernail anymore. When I think about doing something
mundane like clipping my fingernail and I think,
wait a minute, I'm in Islam.
I'm thinking about Allah.
I'm in Islam
and there's a dude in the Haram, sat
on my foot.
And when I looked at him, he didn't
say anything.
I'm getting ready to punch him out, and
then somebody said, brother, subar subar subar. Why?
Because you're in Iqram.
Oh, there's a belt. I want to kill
him. You said, no, man. I'm in Iqram.
Don't long as he's not biting you. Don't
do any leave him alone. Don't cut your
hair.
Don't shave.
Because
you are now in a heightened state of
awareness.
Because you're making this dikr, you're making this
talibyah. Here I come Allah. I'm trying to
serve you every step.
So that you would give me the reward
that my journey would continue
in this life.
That you would forgive me of my sins,
and that then I would journey over the
Siratul Mustaqim
in this life, and then over the Sirat
into Aljannah.
I'm on a journey.
That walhamdulillah,
in that journey that they may witness the
blessings for them,
and they might mention the name of Allah
during the days over which Allah has given
them the cattle
for them to eat and then to feed
the distressed and the needy.
So
part of that journey is to say, not
only am I here that Allah might forgive
me,
but also, walhamdulillah,
that Allah has ordained
certain times, certain actions, certain functions, that if
I am in that state of dhikr, of
remembrance of Allah, it affects my behavior. And
walhamdulillah,
in that,
I am aware of those around me
who are in need. Please come forward brothers.
There is a rewire of the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wasallam.
Traditionally says,
live in this life
as if you are a traveler.
Live in this life
as if you are a traveler.
His companion, Ali,
and he said, therefore,
what?
You should
plan
as if you're going to live
forever,
and you will,
and pray as if you're going to die
tomorrow.
Think of yourself and your life. You're on
a journey.
When you're on a journey
and you know where you're going,
you don't pack excess junk.
Maybe some people do.
But when you know
you chart out your journey,
you know where you're going,
you set your priorities.
I know I have a 13 year old
daughter.
When we're going on a road trip, she
wants to take every single thing from the
house and put in the car.
I told it's not necessary.
We've plotted out the journey. We're gonna go
here. We're gonna stop and eat there. And
then when we get to grandma's house, they
have such and such and such. You don't
need all that junk.
There are people who will live in this
life.
People who are accumulating and accumulating
and accumulating a bunch of junk.
And then when they when they finally reach
the grave,
then they say, what what was I doing
with all this?
What did I do? Why was I carrying
this?
Why
I should have spent my time on the
journey knowing that
I am going to eventually
cross the Sirat and go into Jannah,
I will pad light.
Have you ever made Hajj, I advise you
that if you haven't, pack light.
The most important garment
is the garment of righteousness.
Bir taqwa. That's the that's the garment that
you need to pack for your journey.
To
plan
as if you're going to live forever.
So then you prioritize. You know what you
need in order to be successful. You pack
that for the journey.
Some of us in America
have become hyper consumers.
How do I know?
Maybe it's not you.
But I know every neighborhood has
a,
storage
plus.
Right?
They have,
these warehouses
where people will have more things than they
can keep in their homes.
The wife says they got too much junk.
You put it in the storage unit. You
pay every month for the storage.
You haven't seen what's in the storage unit
for months.
You need to lighten your load,
because that junk is not gonna help you
get to an agenda.
Lighten your load.
Maybe you might wanna give some of it
away to somebody who could benefit now from
what you have,
To share
what Allah has given you, knowing that, walhamdulillah,
Allah can give you more.
So you plan, walhamdulillah,
to take from this dunya what you need.
And what is excess, walhamdulillah,
to find a way to put it into
the service of Allah.
Right now, if you ask yourself the question,
there are so many wars going on
on our planet,
especially among the Muslims.
I want you to think about it.
What is at the root of many of
these conflicts?
One man, he told me a word in
Arabic that summarizes it.
It's called renima.
He said, sheikh,
they want the renima.
I said, what is that?
He said, it's the things that come out
of the conflict that you benefit from, the
the spoils.
So you have people who are Muslim, they
fight and they kill each other,
along the journey,
thinking that they will get to Jannah.
That's the baggage that takes you to the
hellfire,
but they keep piling it up.
Instead of saying,
I know that I'm on a journey to
meet Allah.
I want to travel with
my good deeds as the garments that I
pack.
That, walhamdulillah,
Allah might accept my journey
and grant me the reward of his Jannah
Hajj, the season of Hajj is on. Many
of our friends and family members, they're leaving
for Hajj.
They're going to take that journey.
They're going to abandon their homes and their
work and their wives and their children and
their husbands, walhamdulillah,
to make a journey
for the sake of Allah
I have had,
the privilege of making Hajj many times.
I'll give you the first warning
in this journey
is by the invitation of Allah only.
By Allah's invitation.
If Allah is not inviting you this year,
but you're you're packed and you're ready to
go and you have everything,
but something happens,
don't become angry.
It's by Allah's invitation.
And there's some of you
who are not ready for Hajj, you don't
think you're ready and Allah invites you.
I met people like this.
They had the niyyah in their heart. Oh
Allah, open the door of your house for
me. I don't have enough money. I don't
have enough health. I don't have no whatever.
Oh Allah, I want to go.
One man said
a friend of his came to him and
he said, you know, I I
have a Hajj package, brother.
He said, but something is happening to my
loved one. I can't leave.
And I I I don't wanna go through
the hassle of selling
my package.
I know you're a good brother. You wanna
go. Here it is.
He said, well, yeah. He said, hey. Hajj,
Here, take
it. It was like, subhanallah, really? He said,
yeah. He said, you know, I had my
niyyah for Hajj, but I didn't know how
I was gonna go.
I knew a man, Wilhamdulillah, Howard University, he
came to me one day,
He said, imam,
I'm going for Hajj.
I'm on the journey.
I said, really? He said, hamdulillah, I'm ready.
I said, well brother, let me did you
take some class about Hajj? He said, yeah.
I read I read a book about Hajj,
Hajj a to z, everything. I'm ready for
Hajj.
I said, hamdulillah. I said, one more thing
you ought to be ready for.
He said, what?
I said, Hodges by invitation only.
He said, brother,
I have my ticket.
I have my Saudi visa.
I'm going behind, brother.
I said, I know Hamdi Lattice. We can
go through all of it, Hajj Tamato, Hajj
Ifraad, Hajj, you know, Quran.
I'm gonna go through all of this stuff
with you,
but know at the end of the day
that this is by Allah's
invitation
only.
Well the brother left for Hajj, we gave
him a nice send off.
You know, the list. Please make dua for
me. He asked forgiveness from the people around
him. Any debts he owed, he tried to
satisfy them.
After
Eid,
he comes into the mess just smiling.
Who says, how long brother?
He said, well, not exactly.
I said, what? He said, well, hamdulillah brother,
I'm happy.
He said, you know why I'm happy?
He said, because you told me Hajj was
by invitation only.
He said, when I got to London
and I was getting ready to check-in for
my flight to Saudi Arabia, I showed them
my visa. They said,
oh, I'm sorry, sir.
This is a UMRA visa.
You're welcome to come
after Hajj is over.
The only thing you could hear in his
head is Hajj is by invitation of Allah
only.
But rather than lose his mind,
Abdullah Marham, you're reading the salah, you know
that.
Rather than lose his mind, he said, you
know what?
I'm on a journey for Allah, wherever Allah
wants to take me. That's where I'm going.
And whatever nirma Allah has,
I'm looking to accept it. Labayk Allahumma Labayk
Labayk
Allah is sovereign. He's in control. He knows
what he's doing.
He left the airport. He went to the
central Masjid in London,
and he stayed there for the days of
Hajj.
He said, brother,
those brothers and sisters in that Masjid,
they took me in.
They fed me. He said,
I never felt so much love and affection
from people who I never met before.
I said, brother, if you'd gone and hide,
you'd have you'd have found that, like, exponentially.
He said, but I found it in a
little mosque in London.
And I'm so grateful to Allah,
and I'm gonna try again and keep my
niyyah
that Allah opened
the doors of his house for me
so that I might make Hajj.
That's the that's the attitude.
Now I never leave you without giving you
a challenge. I don't know if maybe some
of y'all don't know that.
Allah
in the Quran
describes
a function that he wants
Ibrahim
to
engage
in. Ibrahim
alaihis salam.
Ibrahim is a journeyer.
If you study the life of Ibrahim alaihis
salam, you know he traveled
all around the region. Mesopotamia,
Syria. He went everywhere. Egypt,
Mecca, Murrahma.
He went everywhere to on the journey for
Allah.
Sometimes he have to leave his wife. Sometimes
he have to leave his children, but he's
on the journey for Allah. Allah is guiding
him.
Allah tells Ibrahim, come forward, brother. You see
the brother standing up there. Come forward.
Come, brother. Have a seat.
And that's one of the reasons I accepted
Islam, you know.
Nur, the hospitality of Muslims.
Unbelievable.
Subhalellah, Ibrahim alayhi salam, he's a dirtier.
And Allah tells him,
call
all of humanity
to this house.
Raised on the foundation
by you and your son. Call everybody.
Call all of humanity to come to say,
Labayk Allahumma Labayk. Labayk Allah shariqalakarabayk.
In your hamda waniemotalekawwamak.
Tell them to come.
Ibrahim
just
the way Johari would have said
it. He said, You Allah, I'm just one
person. I don't have microphone.
I don't have the internet.
I don't have Facebook.
I don't have Instagram.
I can't take a selfie and send it
to every all my friends. I'm in Makkah.
Can't do any of that.
You Allah, how am I going to fulfill
your command to call all of the people
to your house?
Hajj is a duty
upon
humanity.
It is not a duty
on Faruk and Abdullah and Aisha and Fatima.
It is an obligation
to every
single person on earth. Ibrahim
alaihis salaam said, Yahweh, how can I make
all of these people hear that message?
And the answer is simple.
You make the call
and Allah will make them hear it.
You make the call.
This is the command of the prophets.
You don't make people become Muslim.
You give them the message of what Islam
is, and if they accept that message, then
you start seeing that in their journey.
And by the way, some of them when
you meet them, you talk about Islam.
He's on a journey, but he didn't get
to Laila, hollaha, Muhammad, sallaha yet.
Don't give up on him.
Man, if some people had given up on
me, I'll know where I'd be.
You make the call.
Go out between now
and October 3rd.
Tell your neighbor,
you know, Hajj is coming.
They say, what? Yeah. The pilgrimage to Mecca.
You know, Malcolm x made the pilgrimage to
Mecca?
Tell your neighbor,
Hodge is coming.
If you need an excuse, I know you
need an excuse because you don't wanna just
mister Eunice, you just wanna go to your
friend and say, Hodge is coming. He's like,
Hodge? Who is Hodge?
Right?
Tell him, we're having
a celebration
of the world's
largest
annual migration
of a religious nature
on October 4th.
October 3rd,
you're gonna see millions of people all gathered,
all races, all gender, all languages, all colors,
everybody
coming
to do what Ibrahim
asked them to do.
They said, really? Yeah. So if you don't
know, look on PBS. They're gonna have it
on PBS.
Actually,
Sheikh Barham,
December 23rd, they're gonna have a program on
PBS about Hajj.
I know because I'm in it.
And they wanna know about Hajj. I said,
if you look at Hajj,
tell your neighbor,
you think as a neighbor, black and white
can't live together because of Ferguson.
You the neighbor, you think that the Sunni
and the Shia can't live together because of
Iraq.
You think that this one and that one
can't get along, the Jew and what because
I said, look look at Hajj.
You're gonna take millions of strangers.
They speak all different languages.
And for the days of Hajj,
no violence,
No rioting.
No crime.
No *.
I saw a woman on Hajj laying on
the ground, asleep with her baby who was
nursing. Nobody touched her.
If we can do that as the Ummah
Rasulullah
sallallahu alaihi wasallam, it is a teachable
moment.
Humanity is on a journey.
Now we have to show them how to
take the next step.
If we can live in peace and harmony
crowded into Mecca,
10,
11, 12 days,
there's hope for humanity.
Tell your neighbor, come to my house. We're
going to celebrate.
That
read the newspaper and see about this journey
to worship Allah.
I'm challenging you.
Take some of the meat from the aunihi
and give it to the needy people,
so they know what the sweetness of Hajj
is.
Because Hajj is a duty upon mankind.
That Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, might find our
journeys in this life acceptable
and grant us the reward of his jannah,
Oh, Allah, guide us among those whom you
have guided. Oh, Allah, protect us among those
whom you have protected.
You Allah, take us as a friend as
you have taken Ibrahim
alayhis salaam as a friend. Oh, Allah, we
ask for your mercy and your peace on
those who are suffering, You Allah, around the
corner and around the world. You Allah, those
who are suffering today because of the floods
in Kashmir, You Allah. You Allah, the violence
in the holy land, You Allah. Those who
are suffering, our anoodulillah,
at the hand of their brother or their
sister, You Allah. O Allah, in Iraq and
in Afghanistan.
O Allah, we pray for those who are
living under the epidemic, You Allah, in West
Africa
with the Ebola virus. You Allah, we ask
that you put your shifa and your rahma
and your barakah, You Allah. On those who
say, la ilaha illallah
Muhammadan
Rasulullah.
O Allah, we ask for your mercy on
those who are making the journey in your
name, You Allah. Saying, labayk Allahumma labayk
Allah shariqalaka labayk
You Allah, we ask that you accept their
journey and their du'a for us will remain
behind.
You Allah, that you might forgive them and
us of our sins. And grant us the
reward of your jannah ma'abran.
O Allah, we ask for your mercy and
your peace on the prophet
and on his family and on his companions.
And all of them, be a, you Allah,
and those who follow the way of your
haqq, you Allah, your truth until the day
of judgment.
Amin.
The salah is gonna be led by
my brother Abdullah Marhomes Sheikh,
and they're having tomorrow an open house
for our Quran Institute.
If you like the recitation you hear today,
enroll your child in the institute,
that they can lead you in salah in
your house.