Khalid Latif – Essentials of Ramadan #2
AI: Summary ©
The importance of intentions in praising and setting goals for life is emphasized, along with the need for attentive focus and gratitude. The speakers emphasize the importance of finding one's own values and setting boundaries, and the need for finding a person to be present when writing a thank you letter and finding a person to be present when writing a thank you letter. Additionally, the speakers emphasize the importance of finding a person to be present when writing a thank you letter, finding a person to be present when writing a thank you letter, and separating individual obstacles to avoid obstacle in feeling. Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom
AI: Summary ©
To I'm just gonna open the YouTube also
so I can see
where people are at.
Okay, Marcela. So,
we're gonna get started. This is now for
us kinda shifting gears
and talking about Ramadan prep.
And
tonight, a lot of what we're gonna be
discussing in terms of Ramadan preparation
is essentially what we're bringing of ourselves
to this experience of Ramadan.
And so to understand this in a framework
of the self,
you gotta first know, like, what is it
that
makes you you in your entirety,
and what
this means in terms of its relationship
to Ramadan. A lot of times what people
say is,
you know, at times, platitudinally,
like, you wanna set intentions.
But that's pretty much the base of a
lot of what we do in our religion
is knowing why you're doing what you're doing
before you even do it.
And so a chunk of what we're gonna
talk about tonight is this concept of intention,
what goes into our intentions, etcetera.
What I'd like for you to do just
take a quick minute,
and turn to the persons next to you,
so we can kinda familiarize ourselves with a
new group of people.
Like, what do you know about this concept
of intentions within our
tradition? Why is it something that's as emphasized
as it is?
And how do I start to align myself
with intention
in terms of my approach to Ramadan
in particular,
as well as any other kind of guiding
things that might be in front of me
right now, but it's Ramadan prep class.
So with this notion of intention,
like, why is this such an emphasized thing,
and how do I start to
kinda
bring presence to the formation of intention around
Ramadan? Does the question make sense? Yeah. So
you can turn the person next to you,
exchange some names, you know, how your day
went. And let's start just with this so
we can get discussed in, on things. Can
we have everybody just move in a bit?
Is that okay? So if you're kinda sitting
towards my right, if you could shift over
this way, that would be helpful.
Yeah.
Yeah. But go ahead. Feel free to just
kinda talk it out for a little bit,
and then we'll get started.
Okay. So why is this thing so important?
How do we how do we even start
to determine or align it for ourselves, this
thing of intention? What are we discussing?
What did you talk about?
You just talk about what? You just talk
about your day? That's all as far as
you got?
Yeah.
You know what's interesting is the one we
just did on the 40 hadith
had, like,
10 times as many guys in it
and not as many, like, women, and now
it's the reverse.
I don't really know what's going on here.
Interesting.
Yeah.
What so what do we do with this
thing of intentions?
Like, how how do I start to align
this for myself? What do I know about
it? What did you talk about? And if
you didn't talk about it, like, just what
comes up.
Yeah.
Yep.
So the first thing that comes to mind
is
just that any action can have
like, any action is neutral,
generally speaking, and
the intention is what powers it or gives
it its, like,
context of positive negative negativity,
etcetera, and also, like,
determines the magnitude of it.
So we're talking about how you can take
the smallest action,
that seems the most insignificant to anybody else.
Like, for example, maybe you decide that during
Ramadan, you wanna be the person who smiles
at everybody,
who you see.
And that can be the tiniest thing. But
if you power it with intention and you,
and especially direct that attention towards pleasing a
lot, like, the impact both for yourself, the
reward, as well as impact on people around
you,
it could be, like, intensified by something you
couldn't imagine.
Amazing. Other thoughts?
Do you have your hand raised in the
back? Yeah. Go ahead.
Okay.
Why is it important or relevant to us
right now as we're talking about Ramadan prep?
Is it important?
Okay. So then why?
You can't be silent on the first one,
and then smile and nod at the second
one. Why? Why is it important?
You gotta think like, Islam is a thinking
person's religion.
Do you know? It's not a religion that
just says you just gotta believe it
even if it doesn't make sense.
You just have to believe it even if
it's complicated and it takes me a long
time to explain it to you. Right? Why
would God want a complex way of understanding
him? Do you get what I mean? That
the ability
to utilize your mental faculties, your organ of
cognition,
to be able to then land in a
place
where the things that we know are important,
if we have not built a relationship with
them, then we're not gonna utilize them.
So none of you said anything
when I said, why is it important?
But all of you said, yes, when I
said, is it important?
Do you see?
So why is it important
as we prep for Ramadan
to be able to situate for ourselves
intentionality
in that preparation.
Yeah. It basically says it's like a whole
precursor to Ramadan itself. So, like, you know,
day 1 when you start fasting.
Right? Like,
usually, people are very chaotic to wake up.
They think, you know, to wake up. Some
people are stressed out saying, oh my god.
I gotta make this. I gotta make that.
I gotta plan, you know, my day. I
gotta plan how I'm gonna break my fast,
if not, and whatnot. And you and, you
know, it's like, I guess, like, having the
right intention. And now you just, like, orient
yourself to so that you're more organized, but
it makes it makes sure that, you know,
you focus on what's important. Right? You're centered,
right, in terms of spiritual growth. It's not
just, you know, I got away from all
of it so that I could eat x,
y, zed food. Right?
So that's why. Great. Other thoughts?
Yeah.
So,
we're gonna be dealing with a lot of
physical limitations
from one day to another, and I think
it would be nice to just look back
on our own intentions
in case we are disappointed
with with a certain day.
Great. Anything else?
Yeah. And as Harris said, intention to inform
the execution
of our actions.
So where our mind is at at the
outset
of a period helps us determine
where we're gonna go. It also informs
the
this evaluation
of an action. Right? As, this is just
that
where our heart is at
when we're doing these actions and forms how
we're rewarded for, and we wanna make sure
we're rewarded to the utmost extent in this
blessed period.
Amazing.
So if I asked you
where does intention
live with you,
where does it exist?
Because you exist
and you have capacity.
You're not everywhere. Right? You are where you
are right now.
So if I said, show me your fingers.
Right?
Fingers.
These are your fingers.
Where is intention exist within you?
In your in your mind? Great. Anywhere else?
In my heart. In your heart. Amazing.
So these are important things to understand
because fundamentally,
everything in this religion goes back to the
heart.
It can choose to go elsewhere,
but
your Ramadan
amplified
is only achievable
if you recognize
all of you in your entirety that you're
bringing to preparation for it. Does that make
sense?
Indeed actions are by their intentions.
If you come to the 40 hadith class
that we do, this is the first hadith
that we looked at.
You are not gonna get a regurgitation
of what we discussed in that class. If
you've come to it before or you've heard
it someplace else before,
but
understand how this religion works.
You don't learn something here and then learn
something here and then they exist separate from
each other. But you learn this thing here
so that you can apply what you've learned
to what it is that you're learning over
here.
Does that make sense?
So how does, like, Surah Ikhlas
chapter of the Quran that a lot of
us know.
Right?
Say that he is god, the only one.
Right?
How does that apply to Ramadan?
How does, like,
apply? You don't have to know, like, the
whole book to be able to take and
extrapolate and apply to things.
So this Hadith,
this prophetic narration,
the Hadith of intentions
is pretty much the first Hadith that's in
every book of hadith that you read. The
hadith on intentions.
Because you wanna know why you're gonna do
what you're gonna do before you do it.
It's not that you can't do without knowing
because you can categorize
actions
into conscious and unconscious modes of exertion.
And there's good in both, and there's things
that are problematic in both. Right?
Like the blessing of being able to do
without consciousness. In Arabic, this is called the.
You're doing an act, but there's no presence
to it.
You don't have to think about every time
you blink your eyes.
What if you had to do that?
What if you had to think about every
time you took a breath?
Now I'm gonna blink. Now I'm gonna breathe.
Now I'm gonna blink. Now I'm gonna breathe.
What would your life be?
I've sat with people in hospitals
who they cannot breathe on their own. May
Allah make it easy for them. It's not
an easy thing.
There's individuals who have all kinds of challenges
that what we can do
with
unconscious
just existence,
they have to exert conscious frames.
When you add in now the element now
of intention,
intention can be broken down into what is
actual
and what is perceived.
Because you could
think that you're doing it for the right
reason.
I'm telling you that you should pray 5
times a day.
Not a bad thing to say to somebody.
But what if I'm telling you to make
you feel like garbage?
Right?
The manifestation of the act is still rooted
in the same,
but the intentionality
behind it is different.
And I wrestle with it because the acceptance
of the act in Islam as a religion
brings together 2 pieces,
intention
as well as a sound act.
Both of them have to be good, not
in the prism of moral relativism,
but in the prism of
what does God say goodness is.
And sometimes what is apparent of an act
can seem like it does not have goodness
to it, but the intention is what makes
it whole.
So what if you saw me
late at night and I was standing
walking out of a club in Manhattan?
Right? Just get that mental picture in your
head. Call it in the club. It's the
worst thing in the world you could think
of.
You don't know what's going on, but it's
like, man, I just prayed Joma behind that
guy, and he's coming out. Nobody's thinking, what
am I doing out at 2 o'clock in
the morning? Driving past the club late at
night. Right?
But what if I was there because I
know there's a young woman
who I was told
she blacks out when she drinks,
and people then become predatorial.
Do you get what I mean?
So the understanding of it still has consequence
at the end of the day. I've willfully
chosen to be in a place that I
have accountability
of perception.
Might not apply the same to everybody,
but I have, like,
a figure as a community servant,
so certain things come in different ways. You
all are nice people, and you're not, like,
super judgy of me. So most of you
probably wouldn't be like, man, he must have
been up in there, like, de stressing. This
is how he preps for Jho mala on
a Thursday night.
No. But, fundamentally,
the intent is more kind of what the
objective is
in a case by case, but the norm
is both have to go hand in hand.
You can have terrible intention to acts that
also are terrible. Right? And the intention is
the gift that keeps you in check. How
can I fundamentally,
in the name of God,
like, hit my child? Really think about it.
May Allah protect us from this.
How can you in the name of God,
like, be racist?
How can you in the name of God
be hateful, xenophobic?
How can you fundamentally, in the name of
God, gossip, lie, back by cheat? Like, what
kind of God do you believe in at
that point in time?
Creates for me intention that also sets for
me a standard.
My intent
is to wake up for suhoor
every day in Ramadan.
Right? You should try your best to wake
up for the pre fajr meal
because the prophet says, peace be upon him,
that there's blessing in it, even if just
taking a sip of water.
The intent in it and blessing Barakah,
if we give it a definition, I'm gonna
say pretty much every time we meet,
barakah is the ability to do more with
less.
So you want it, you gotta do the
things that bring it into play.
Your intent becomes a metric of assessment.
If you really want to pray for Fudger,
tell me how you sleep at night
and stay awake at night
indicates that your intention is real.
Does it make sense?
You wanna get up before the sun rises
to drink even a sip of water.
Your intention
has to be now what is the metric
of being like, this is what I'm trying
to achieve.
How is all this stuff leading into it
gonna make that possible?
I,
on Friday night, was here. We had a
healing circle for Sudan. Allah make things easy
for the people of Sudan. Right? Supposed to
end at 9. We ended at 11. It
was a beautiful space. Wish we could've stayed
even later.
I got to the bus stop at Aster
Place, and I'm waiting for the bus.
And I'm not gonna say, like, there was
a problem. Most of the bus drivers in
New York, they're really nice. Sometimes they even
stop in the rain for me because we
go on the same bus routes. Right? They
we know each other. I did not know
this person. I'm in my in my turban.
I'm looking at the bus schedule. It's supposed
to be moving. The bus is not moving.
The bus driver is looking at me. I'm
looking at her. Nothing's happening. Right? And then
all of a sudden, this guy taps me
on my shoulder, and it's a kid who
graduated from here years ago, and he's with
2 other brown guys. Now 4 of us,
close to midnight, are standing. This bus driver
looks petrified out of Vermont.
Right? So the guy said to me, hey.
I'm gonna go to Union Square
to pick up some chicken and rice. He
said, I've called it in already. And I
said, who calls in chicken and rice to
his people? He was like, no. I called
the guy. I know him. He's gonna have
it ready for me. And so I walked
with him to Union Square. This is all
true. And I walked to Union Square with
him, and then I walked in my apartment
from there.
And I got into bed, like, around 1
o'clock in the morning. I woke up at
Fajr the next day,
and my family and I, we had to
go somewhere.
And
we, like, got back home, and then the
next day I had to wake up again
to do some stuff.
And
then at, like,
2, 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I just
passed out.
And I just slept because I needed to
sleep.
And I woke up because I need to
pray, and then I went to bed, like,
at a reasonable hour. But I had a
few days
that were off in my routine.
And so this morning,
after Fudger,
I was up helping get my kids ready,
and then I just fell asleep again for
a couple hours. And my wife, who's amazing,
they do offer her. She said, I'll take
the kids to school because I normally take
them.
And my daughter
who
does now walks sometimes to school by herself,
but she likes when we walk her. She
said, Bobo, you rest. I'm gonna just walk
to school. So I was, like, amazing.
I was, like, just knocked out on my
couch. Right?
I need to do that with mindfulness and
strategy
so that
I am able to fulfill
intention
throughout the rest of the course of the
week. Do you get what I mean?
And I know based off of my behavior
that
it's not going to allow for me to
actualize
what's necessary to yield the objective. Right? Imam
Ghazali,
Ramallah,
was like a great spiritual
kinda
teacher, knowledgeable,
scholar across our religious tradition. He was at,
like, the pinnacle of what you could be
in terms of notoriety,
scholarship,
you you
know, books that he'd written, etcetera,
prestigious
positions,
and then he just left all of it
to go to places where nobody knew who
he was.
There's stories where people would find him, like,
sweeping
in, like, masjids.
Right?
Really remarkable individual,
but deeply
aware
of a lot of things and should read
his books and his text. A lot of
them are translated into English. He said that
Nia, intention,
is the motivation of the self,
its aim,
and inclination
to obtain the manifestation of its goal
either presently or in the future.
It sets for me a metric
that similar to, like, if you're driving your
car
and you missed a turn,
you become aware of the fact that you
missed the turn, and then you go back
and you say, I gotta figure out how
to get back to my destination.
Doesn't mean you're a bad human being, but
it's setting for you now metrics of assessment.
Am I getting to where I wanted to
be? The intention is setting that for me.
Does that make sense?
Right?
Ibn Taymiyyah Ramallah,
who ideologically is on, like, another end of
the spectrum from Imam Ghazali,
but both really well known prolific scholars.
He says the place of nia
is the heart or the conscious,
these organs of cognition, and not on the
tongue.
So my intention
becomes
a means through which I can measure,
like, what I'm doing, does it own up
to what it is that I'm saying? And
that can be in the present or the
future. Right?
I wanna have this job that's gonna make
me a lot of money so I can
give to people who don't have money.
So a lot of people say, you know
what, Khalid? I'm gonna go and I'm gonna
work in corporate America. I'm gonna do this.
Like, great, man. Allah give you tawfiq. And
I'm gonna make 1,000,000 of dollars, and I'm
gonna go give it to people. And then
they'll sit with me, like, 6, 7 years
later, and we're having a conversation, and they're
like,
how come I'm not giving money to people?
I'm like, I don't know.
I'm happy to figure that out with you.
What are the obstacles that get in the
way?
But the actualization of the intention,
they now have a means to say, this
is why I said I was gonna do
what I did. This is why I prayed
to God saying, give me this thing.
Nobody prays to God saying, can you give
me this spouse so I treat them like
garbage 10 years from now? Right?
Nobody prays to god saying, I really wanna
have a kid so that I can oppress
my child.
Right?
What gets in the way?
There becomes an absence
of intentionality
and a revisiting of intention.
You wanted it and you asked for it,
and then when it was given to you,
did you do with it what it was
that you said you would actually wanted to
do?
When says
the place of intention
is in the conscious or in the heart
and not on the tongue, it doesn't mean
you don't express it. Right?
But in order for us to get out
of what we can from Ramadan,
if this thing exists in the heart, that's
what all of you said in unison, and
it's interesting
what all of you say
in unison.
Right? Why is intention important?
Nobody says nothing. Is it important? Yeah. Everybody
says yes. Great.
What is this thing of intention?
Where does it exist?
You know? Everybody says the heart.
Amazing.
You have inside of you this thing that
is your spiritual heart. Inside of you also,
in an Islamic framework of the self, you
have the intellect, the aqqal, you have the
nafs, the lower self, you have the ruh,
the soul, the spirit, You have sheer will
and determination,
and so much more.
Nia
intention
is in your heart.
It makes sense that people forget their intention
as they get older, because so much of
the world
is telling you to feed the physical,
and not to be focused on the heart.
If I told you show me in your
calendars
in the last day, week, month, not what's
forthcoming,
but what's already transpired
in the last week, the last month. Show
me what you did with the time you
spent that your heart is important to you.
What could you point at
that's deliberate, not organic?
It was really nice, like, somebody I haven't
talked to in a while. They called me,
and
they spoke to me, and I just felt
great after meeting with them.
Great. That's a gift from God. You didn't
plan it.
What are you planning for the wellness of
your heart?
Why is this relevant to what we're talking
about here?
If intention is in your heart,
then
it gets blurred if there's a lot of
other stuff in the heart too. Right?
And what you're bringing of yourself to Ramadan
is yourself in its entirety.
So I want you to take a few
minutes,
open up a notebook
right at the top. If you don't have
a notebook, take out a phone and actually
do it. Right? If you don't do it,
I'm gonna push back on you as your
brother who loves you and says, you have
to care about yourself enough to do it.
If you don't yield to process,
you're not gonna get out of it. Because
inside of your mind, if you just think
kind of in a vacuum, it's gonna be
all this other mess.
The
function of writing
is going to help you to stay a
little bit more attentive.
So I'd like you to do,
since everybody said intention is important,
and everybody said the heart is where intention
lives, your words, not mine.
What's in your heart right now?
If you were to identify
the things that are
given abode inside of this
important piece of you,
what exists in there? What lives in there?
Emotions,
feelings,
memories,
things that are helpful, things that are painful.
The spiritual heart has capacity, and you can
write as I'm talking.
It's not infinite in what it can hold.
So if you have a cup that is
filled to its brim,
you cannot put more into it until it
is emptied.
If we want to meet Ramadan in a
place that we reach
our best through it, but we are also
as best as we can be, Doesn't mean
we have to heal from everything, but we
have to first even acknowledge what's in this
thing to begin with.
And if I don't admit what's there, it
doesn't mean that it's not there.
So I want you to take
a good,
like, few minutes,
5 minutes,
not 2 minutes, right at the top.
What is being housed in my heart?
What are the things that I actually love?
Right? What is my heart attached to?
Healthy,
unhealthy?
What is it holding on to? What's like
sitting in it? Do you know?
But just take a few minutes
and be with yourself.
If I was to take an inward look,
my heart is in front of me. What
would I find within it?
Okay.
So if you take 2 minutes, and I'll
just turn to the person next to you.
What is that process like for you? You
don't have to say what you actually wrote
unless you feel like you're inclined towards, but
that's just for you and your eyes
and God. But just the actual process of
reflecting.
Like, what am I holding in myself? What
am I carrying in myself?
Do you know what I mean?
If you can talk to the person next
to you, what was it like to engage
in that as a process?
And then we'll come back and discuss. But
go ahead. If you don't know the name
of the person next to you, just share
your names, and we'll come back.
Okay. So what was it like,
the process
of just kinda
that inward reflection?
You know, as you are
trying
to determine this is what you're bringing
to Ramadan.
So how does that process go for you?
What was that like for people experientially?
What did you talk about? Yeah.
I said that it was very instinctful. Like,
basically, I always, like I didn't really think
about a lot of the things, like, how
I was wording it. It was just, like,
you know, I just kept on going and
going. And then when I'm looking at some
of the things I'm writing, like, some of
the things were actually very surprising. I was
like, wow. You know, this is something that
actually, like, I hold in my heart, like,
actually has, like, you know, significant space,
you know, and I don't think about these
things on an everyday basis. So it's definitely
something where I'm like, you know, oh, maybe
I should,
you know, think about this more or resolve
this issue or whatever it may be.
Great. Anyone else?
Even if it's tough, it was easy. Like
yeah.
Right. I think most of the,
they just
they basically said how, like, at first, you
know, we wanna admit it or you feel
like, oh, and I have to attack for
this. You know?
But
then, like, you know, you have to, like,
sort of, like
like, it was hard accepting the truth
because, like, you and I would really wanna
put on paper. You just want to, you
know, like, clean it up. And they're like,
no. No.
Like, the more and more you reflect, the
more and more you act advice. This is
true.
Like, this is, like, what's actually in my
heart
and how we never really have the time
to put aside that.
Instead, we just you know, we don't really
reflect on that.
That's what I said we should.
Yeah.
If you have an obstacle
and you pretend like it's not there, it
doesn't mean that it's not there still. Right?
Like, if I want to get over there
and there's a literal barrier in front of
me,
I have to still figure out how to
get past the barrier. And if I'm pretending
like the barrier is not there,
and I'm then getting frustrated that I'm not
getting to my destination,
the feeling of stuckness
is not necessarily because I don't know where
I want to be,
but I'm not actually willing to admit what's
getting in the way.
You understand?
And so if you wanna get ready for
Ramadan,
you gotta know, like, what's going on inside.
Right? Ibin Taymiyyah, when he says this, Rahmullah,
the place of niya
is not on the tongue, but it's in
the conscious and in the heart.
What else is in your heart then?
You have a love of validation for people,
the insecurities,
like things that are positive also, Right? And
if your frame is only about all the
garbage that's in there, that's also telling you
something about how you see yourself and how
you make sense of the word, you know?
Like, if I open my heart, I got
a lot of love for my kids, for
my wife. I got a lot of love
for, like, all of you, you know what
I mean? Like, there's so much that goes
into this that also has positives.
But if I'm overwhelmed
by denying the negative,
and I don't see it as a necessary
part
to be able to enhance the positive,
then I'm also taking away from the positive
as best as I can. Do you know
what I mean? What do we have here?
Oh, great.
If anybody wants food food, there's now food
food here. Yes. Yeah. So feel free to
grab some.
So do you get what I'm saying?
Right?
When Allah
chooses who's gonna be the last prophet to
mankind,
Abdullah ibn Masood Radiallahu An who we talked
about in the 40 hadith class,
he's an early companion of the prophet. He's
one of the black companions.
There's narrations that speak about his hair being
in braids. He's the first one to recite
Quran publicly.
He is of a small physical stature.
Sometimes the companions would, like, laugh at him
and how skinny his legs were. There's a
hadith where, like, the wind blows and you
can see his legs and they're kinda making
a joke, and the prophet says
his those legs are gonna weigh heavier on
the scales on the day of judgment than
the mountain of Uhud. Right? Abdullah ibn Masurud
is no joke,
and he narrates a hadith that says,
that indeed Allah looks into the hearts of,
his righteous servants, and he finds that the
best of hearts is the heart of Muhammad,
peace and blessings be upon him. And so
he chooses him to be his last prophet,
endows him with this responsibility.
When God is choosing his messenger,
the place that he starts with is the
heart.
When God looks at us, the tradition doesn't
say that God looks at our outwards. It
actually says the opposite.
God doesn't look at your bodies and your
forms, but he looks at your hearts and
your deeds.
So you wanna start where Allah starts.
There's a companion
by the name of Abdullah ibn Amer ibn
al-'Aas.
So there's 4 Abdulas who are companions
of the prophet.
They are younger companions.
Abdul ibn Masood is not included in them
because he became Muslim
in the early part
of Islam in Mecca.
So these other 4. Right? Abdullah ibn Umar,
Abdullah ibn Abbas,
Abdullah ibn Umar ibn Al As,
and one more who I don't remember the
3 that I said, but there's 4 of
them. Right?
And so
Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-'Az, he's the son
of a man by the name of Amr
ibn al-'Aas,
who was at one point one of the
staunchest enemies of Islam.
And
he then converts
his son, Abdullah,
who's a Muslim.
And
Abdullah,
he's with the prophet on one occasion
when a companion by the name of Anas
is narrating this experience.
And the prophet says, do you wanna see
a man of paradise?
And they say, yes.
And this man comes, his beard is disheveled.
The narration says, he's just made like a
fresh will do. He just washed up for
prayer,
and then he came to pray,
and they say he was carrying both of
his shoes in his left hand. They're giving
a depiction
because nobody knows who this man is.
He's not like a senior companion of the
prophet. There's nothing distinct about him, so they're
mentioning distinct qualities
as if these are the things that make
him distinct.
The 2nd day, the same thing happens, and
the 3rd day, the same thing happens.
When the prophet gets up to leave, Abdullah
ibn Amr ibn al-'As,
he follows the man and he tells him,
my father and I are having an argument.
Can I stay in your house?
And the guy says, yeah. Go for it.
He doesn't say, what are you fighting about?
Like, what's going on over there? He just
says, you can stay in my home.
Abdullah Radialahu An, he stays in the house
for 3 days.
He says, I see him. He prays Isha,
he's not praying anything extra.
He gets up for Fajr,
but he's not getting up at night.
Like, there's not, like, a bunch of things
he's doing in the secret parts of the
night.
The guy's just doing, like, his obligations.
Do you know?
So Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al As after
3 nights passed,
and he didn't find anything that was so
unique in what was going on in this
man's nights.
He says to him that
I am not in an argument with my
father,
and I don't have any problems with my
dad.
I'm here because I heard the prophet say
3 times
on 3 days
that you are a man of paradise.
Right? Basically, it's saying, like, what's going on?
Because you're not doing anything.
Like, that's so unique.
You're just praying Isha, and you're praying Fajr.
You know? Like, what what's happening?
Right?
And the man says
to him and he says, why did the
prophet
convey this about you? And the man says
and I just wanna read, like, his words,
verbatim. He says, it is not but as
you see,
except
that
I find no malice within myself towards others,
nor do I envy anyone for the good
that Allah has given them.
And Abdullah
he says,
this is what was conveyed this is what
was conveyed about you,
for we have been unable to do so.
Does it make sense?
I have no malice towards these Muslims. I
have no envy towards people.
He just cleans his heart out regularly.
He's showing up to pray. Nobody knows his
name. Why does he need to be known?
He's designated by the messenger of God as
a man of paradise.
Now you wanna think consequently why?
You got goodness in here,
then it's gonna reflect on the goodness you
put into the world.
You can only give what it is that
you possess in the first place.
Right? So if I have pain, I'm gonna
give pain. If I have anger, I'm gonna
give anger.
If I have all kinds of stuff in
me, that's what I'm gonna give to people.
It doesn't mean that I'm the one that
put it inside of me, but if it's
there,
I still am able to address it and
deal with it.
So here,
this man
is in a place where that
he is just not carrying that baggage inside
of him.
There's no heaviness here. Right?
And these are people who are real humans.
The beauty of Islam
is that it gives us very human insight
and interactions on things. Do you know?
When we went
to Mecca and Medina some weeks ago, and
we were standing at Uhud,
this is a place where a battle takes
at the mountain of Uhud that the Muslims
lose.
Prior to it, they have a battle
at a place called Badr that the Muslims
win against all odds. There's,
like, 300 Muslims
and 4 digits of Quraish.
They think they're gonna be annihilated.
The prophet is literally making dua, praying to
God that, like, everybody
who's gonna make this religion continue is here.
If we lose, this religion stops right at
this place,
you know? They wouldn't bother. It's the 2nd
year after Hydra.
The 3rd year after hijra
is the battle of Uhud.
They lose,
and they lose badly.
A lot of the senior companions of the
prophet get killed at Uhud.
There's a lot of just difficulty
in the aftermath of this.
In the 8th year after hijra
is when
they come and Mecca is
now taken back by the Muslims.
And they walk in
all of them, and the Meccans are in
a place where
they have a lot of trepidation.
Because in this society, you do wrong by
someone,
they have right to do wrong by you.
And there's a man
from the Muslims
who says in the Hadith,
There's gonna be no Quresh after today.
He's carrying this
since Uhud.
5 years, he's holding on to it.
And the prophet says,
everybody's forgiven today.
Do you hear what I mean?
If you're carrying clutter inside of you,
it doesn't go away on the 1st day
of Ramadan.
You're still bringing it to Ramadan.
And if intention
exists in the heart and in the conscious,
and you are in a place where
you are not willing to take a minute.
How long did you sit for? 3 minutes.
I'm looking at the clock. 3 minutes. What's
in my heart?
I don't wanna admit it, but it's there.
The things that are healthy, the things that
are unhealthy, it's all there.
You don't have to address it alone,
but if you don't address it, it doesn't
mean that it's not present.
Does that make sense?
And the tears you cry in Ramadan,
you want them to be like tears of
spiritual joy and relief.
You don't want them to just be tears
of heaviness
and, like, pain. There's a difference between crying
and wailing.
You know?
And once it opens, it just opens and
it lets itself out.
But I can learn about myself through myself.
Ramadan has never been about empty stomachs.
It's been about full hearts.
The idea of
treating your celestial
self, your inner self.
The world outside of you could care less
about the state of your heart. That's why
it teaches you to look at yourself and
not for yourself.
I walked into our Sunday school a week
ago, and I was wearing, like, a black,
you know, and
peacoat
jacket, and I had a black umbrella in
my hand.
Some of the parents said, like, you look
so nice and why? And, you know, I
was just being honest with him. I was
supposed to do a workshop for kids on
prayer that day.
So I wanted to be like, oh, it's
because of the kids. But, realistically, the night
before, I was wearing the same clothes, and
I just left them on the side of
my bed, and I put them on the
next morning.
And then I came to the holocaust on
Monday
last week, and I wore the same outfit
again.
My kids said to me, baba, mama says
we're not supposed to wear the same clothes
every day. And I said, look, man.
I don't want the anxiety
of trying to figure out a new outfit
every day.
I'm not saying you shouldn't change your clothes
every day because I'm scared of your mother,
and I don't want her to get upset
with me.
But
I don't get dressed for the reasons that
other people sometimes get dressed.
That doesn't mean I was always like that,
but
nobody is coming up to me and saying,
other than you, Kareem and Medina, like, why
are you wearing the same clothes 3 days
in a row?
You know?
It doesn't have to just be about clothes,
but your core belief structure,
positive and negative through your socialization,
am I worthy of love? Am I not
worthy of love? Am I worthy of success?
Am I not worthy of success? Am I
beautiful? Am I not beautiful? The Quran says
you're beautiful,
We created humanity in the most beautiful of
forms.
What changed that you stop seeing yourself
the way God sees you?
And all of it goes to the heart.
Ramadan can be a mechanism through which we
can reclaim some of this, but intentionality
has to be rooted beyond just an expression
of the tongue. I want to wake up
for suhoor.
We'll see embedded in suhoor
a transformational
aspect
of just dealing with heaviness in the heart.
Awareness, consciousness,
wakefulness.
But you gotta start from this place.
Some of the things that we can do
now as you're getting ready
that you have to choose to actually do
what I'm saying.
Don't like not do it or one of
those things where we come back next week,
and I'm like, is this a good thing?
And I'll be like, yeah. It's great. Right?
And I said, who did it? And then
there's silence.
You want to be different from most people.
You want to take what you know and
act on what you know and keep them
close together.
Most people, they don't do
what it is that they know that's gonna
be good for them, even when it's hard,
but also especially when it's easy.
In a room as diverse as this,
I can't tell you individually
how to deal with the clutter that's inside
of you
in this setting. We could sit and talk
1 on 1 if you want,
But some generic things
that we can engage in
as we're trying to create
some space inside
or vision modification
of what's going on inside of our heart.
One of the things that the prophet teaches
us, peace be upon him, is
putting good in your heart
in a way
that
practices,
like, appreciation and gratitude.
And you can't see this as something that
is, again, just at a surface level. You
have to actually
engage in it.
So, for example, at the end of every
prayer,
we're taught
to say, SubhanAllah,
glorifying God, Alhamdulillah,
praising and thanking God, Allahu Akbar, like, proclaiming
God's greatness.
There's a narration
that
speaks about this as a thus be a
Fatima,
a litany of the prophet's daughter Fatima,
that she lives in a state of poverty.
Her husband Ali is not a rich man,
and they come to the prophet asking for
help and assistance, and he gives her this
litany, this remembrance,
say these things, 33, 33, 34 times.
Right?
There's other narrations
that just say like, say
it 10 times each
for a total of 30 times. Do it
5 times a day,
it's a 150 times, and it'll be written
as if you did it 10 times over
1500 times. And then in that hadith,
the prophet says people aren't gonna do it,
and the companions say why would they not
do it? And the prophet says because their
hearts are gonna be distracted by something else.
They're gonna be pulled towards something else. You
can't make these things after the prayer if
you don't pray in the first place.
And then when you sit down to pray,
you wanna think, like, for those who pray
their prayers, and that should be all of
you, not because it's burdensome, but because it's
an oasis.
You shift paradigms, and it all goes back
to the heart again.
Right?
Just think about the postures of prayer and
all the nonsense that's filtering in your head
when you're standing and bowing
in in your prayer,
and then think about the silence that comes
when you're in prostration.
Just pay attention to it in the course
of your prayer.
The mess that's floating in your head in
every other motion
likely is not as present,
if at all,
when your head is on the ground.
Why is that?
And just think about it.
This aspect of gratitude,
it is something that you can do in
a lot of different ways, but relevant to
these words,
glorifying God, praising and thanking God, proclaiming God's
greatness, you attach meaning to it. Why am
I glorifying God? What am I praising and
thanking God for? I bring some intentionality
to it. There's deliberate modes of contentment.
When you can be satisfied with what you
have, you're bold enough to ask the question
just like you wrote at the top of
your notebook, like, what's in my heart? You
write at the top of your notebook. How
much is enough?
The stuff doesn't do it for you.
You can be as rich and wealthy as
the most wealthiest person in the world. Doesn't
your heart still hurt when you're sad?
Does all this stuff make you feel as
good as the person you love makes you
feel?
It's not a joke that Fatima and Ali
may god be pleased with both of them,
they don't have a lot of stuff.
And then they're given this in exchange,
a mechanism
to recenter
the inner self.
I don't know why you don't do it,
but if you don't know why because you've
never sat with intention before,
now is the time to think what's in
my heart.
What's distracting me when I sit on the
prayer mat that I can't even sit for
20 seconds
and say 10 times each, let alone 33
times. It's a spiritual exercise. It's gonna have
impact on my heart.
The gratitude that goes into this, you can
understand what the Quran tells us as a
default state.
It talks about humanity a lot and characteristics
that we have. So there's a chapter in
the last part of the Quran. It's called
Surat Al Adiyat.
It gives these depictions of these really beautiful
horses
as they're moving
in directions
in unison,
and there's a verse that says
that indeed
humanity
towards their lord is ungrateful.
There's just no appreciation or gratitude there.
The recognition of a gift or a blessing.
Right? Like you love this space that you're
sitting in right now,
what do you do to keep it clean?
What do you do to take care of
it and provide for it?
What are you doing to sustain it if
you love it, so that a generation after
you've left from this world, people still have
it?
How do you take your spiritual gifts and
express, not just from the tongue, but with
actions,
the utilization
of them from the gift givers point of
view, not your own.
The idea of recognizing the netma blessing is
not so just the blessing is recognized, but
as a mechanism to recognize the giver of
the gift, the giver of the blessing.
And a good number of people in the
world think that just because they have something,
it means they deserve it.
What did you do?
What did you do so that you have
all the stuff that you have?
I worked hard for it. There's people I
could show you on the street when I
walk here. They are in the cold, in
the rain, in the snow,
pushing shopping carts filled with plastic bottles and
cans to recycle them. They work harder than
all of us.
Why do they have what they have, and
you have what you have? It's not a
product of how hard you work, You're just
telling yourself,
I somehow did something to deserve it.
What did you do?
And when you can recognize it's not a
matter of deserving it, then you can recognize
what it is. It's a gift.
When somebody gives you a gift, you use
it in the ways that the gift giver
intended for you to use it.
Not the way that you want to use
it.
My parents don't give me a laptop when
I'm a child
so that I can do things that I
would never want them to know I'm doing
with it.
Allah didn't give me the gift of speech,
so that when my child grows old,
he is paralyzed because of all the adult
words that I put into his child heart.
Do you get what I mean?
The power of gratitude now is that when
you can recognize
how much is enough, you can ask what
is enough,
you start to see what's there as opposed
to what's not there. Not just outwardly, but
inwardly. I can see your beauty, but I'm
not afraid to recognize my own. I don't
perceive myself through shortcomings,
lackings, inefficiencies,
inadequacies.
I don't see why I'm not good enough.
I can see my areas of improvement, but
I can also recognize
where I have capacity
to do right
because there's goodness in me.
So you wanna sit every so often
as a mechanism
to dispel,
like, the blanket of negativity
that says everything sucks. Everything does not suck.
It's a false statement when you say it.
I've been to parts of the world where
I've sat with people
pulling not just their remainings of their belongings,
but searching for their loved ones under the
rubble of home.
And they're still saying, Alhamdulillah,
it's not an exaggeration.
How is that fundamentally
possible? I make dua. I wanna have a
heart like that.
But one thing throws me off of my
course, I didn't get that job, I didn't
get that spouse, I didn't get that car,
I didn't get that thing, and all of
a sudden, it's the worst thing God must
hate me?
So you said every so often, there's 2
methods that you can engage us with in
preparation
for illuminating the heart. Because the prophet says,
he who is not thankful of people is
not thankful of the divine.
Start saying phrases like thank you more.
Express gratitude
for people that you know and you don't
know.
Right?
I say it with love. I sit here
with kids who come from other colleges,
and they say to me, do the kids
who go to this school know what they
have as Muslims?
Because in my school,
it is not anything like this.
And I'm like, no. I love my community,
but a lot of the kids, they take
it for granted.
They don't know actually what they've been gifted
and given.
And then when they graduate
and they come back and they're like, man,
I didn't know what I had. I wish
I had used it a little bit differently.
It's always still here for you to come
back to,
but you express appreciation
by caring for the gift,
by looking over it, not just using it
and then leaving it.
Does it make sense?
So one of the things that we do
quite often is we don't express thanks to
the people who we have in our lives.
A mode of which you can do this
is by saying thank you to people.
I'm gonna read you a letter that I
wrote
to my mother.
I used to every day
write an op ed for the Huffington Post
in Ramadan.
I don't know how old any of you
are to remember this. Did anybody actually read
these things when I used to write them?
You did not read them, man. What are
you talking about? I wrote these things in
2011. How old were you in 2011?
3. 3 years old? Not so old. Yeah.
So 2011
he was 4 years old in 2011?
So
so I got married
in
2011.
Right? Is that true? I think so. Let's
go with it. Yeah.
So I'm writing these things,
and
I'm writing it at a time where I'm
also still, like, single in New York. I
grew up in a Muslim family.
Some of you have. Some of you haven't.
Some of you are still trying to decide
Islam is right for you.
If you grow up in a Muslim family
that practices and observes Ramadan,
there's a good chance as a kid,
somebody else is waking up before you to
get your meal ready for the day before
fajr.
My mom was up before any of the
rest of us,
ate after all of us ate, and went
to sleep much later than everyone else did.
As a single man, I appreciated this amazingly.
In that, I now realized how difficult it
is to do these things for yourself.
So I would wake up and just
hurl whatever I could in my mouth. Didn't
make any sense.
And so
I would write these op eds
at, like, 2 in the morning. I'd come
home from Iftar and
Tahrir
are night prayers,
and I had to write one of these
every day. I wrote them, like like, seriously.
And so one I wrote, it was called
love for my mother,
and at the end of it, I wrote
a thank you letter to my mom.
And I'm gonna read this to you, and
I want you to think about
someone who you've never thanked properly in your
life.
And then I'm gonna ask you to write
a letter to them also.
You don't have to share it with them.
That's step number 2.
They could be somebody who's passed away, and
then it's different.
But if they're still alive,
you potentially can share with them.
So 2 in the morning, I'm sitting on
my couch,
and I wrote this letter to my mom.
I call my mother Ami.
Like, that's what growing up in our house,
we called our mother.
So I said thank you, Ami, for all
your continued support, affection, and love.
Thank you for every kiss and every hug.
Thank you for staying up with me late
at night when I was sick, for making
me up early to drive me to my
football games,
and calling me even today
to make sure I'm getting enough sleep.
Thank you for making me spinach every time
I come home to visit.
No one makes it as good as you
do.
Thank you for coming to watch every one
of my games when I was younger and
for encouraging me in everything I do in
my life today.
Thank you for being someone who listens and
doesn't make me do things just because you
did them a certain way. Thank you for
not forcing me to be a doctor or
a lawyer or anything else that most Desi
parents force their children to become.
Thank you for treating Priya like she is
your own daughter and welcome her into our
family with open arms and embraces.
Thank you for your patience, your understanding, and
your commitment.
Thank you for overlooking my mistakes and for
teaching me so much. I would not be
anything today if not for you. Thank you
for being such an inspiration and great example
to me of how a person should be.
I pray that every child in this world
is blessed with having a mother such as
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're
the most amazing person that I know, and
I love you.
And I published this,
and I was in tears. Even now, I'm
trying to keep tears back. I wrote this
in 2011.
The next morning,
I got emails and text messages from people
all over the world.
Religious scholars,
people who are not Muslim.
We read this thing. It made us think
of our moms or other people.
Then my sister called me that afternoon,
and she said, I'm at home. Mom read
what you wrote. She's sitting here crying. Good
job.
Some years later, I'm sitting in my office
over here.
This building was built in 2012. You should
know your history.
So in 2011, this didn't exist. We're in
the church basement
on 6th Avenue at that time.
2012
is when this building went up. So sometime
after that, I'm sitting with someone in my
office. I'm talking to them about practicing gratitude,
this thank you letters. I shared this
thing, and then I just stopped talking.
And this poor woman who I'm talking to,
she didn't know what to do because I'm
just silent now. And she's like, are you
okay?
I said, you know what's crazy?
I wrote this thing,
and it clearly moved me when I wrote
it.
And I know 100 of thousands of people
read it the next day,
and a lot of people told me how
it also moved them. And I even know
that my mother read it, and it moved
her.
The crazy thing is
I still haven't gone face to face and
said thank you to my mother.
Why is that?
What makes that so hard?
And when you can overcome that gap,
it's gonna definitely be something that illuminates the
heart.
Somebody vacuums this floor
that we pray on.
Do you ever make dua for that person?
Do you ever pray for them?
When you walk into the bathrooms and you
make and you spill water all over the
place, who's cleaning it up?
Did you ever thank God for that person
being in your life?
The person who writes your name on the
cup of coffee that you ordered to your
specificity, they have a name too.
The persons who drive your Ubers, the persons
who drive the buses,
appreciation and gratitude
is a really remarkable thing, and this is
where the second step in the letter writing
is imperative.
Because when you share it with someone, it'll
validate for them.
So a lot of people go throughout their
life, and nobody thanks them for anything.
I have the blessing of serving a community
that I know cares about me and checks
in on me and reaches out and says,
are you okay? Do you need anything?
You know all these people that you see
all over your social media?
The ones that are standing up for Palestine,
the ones that are speaking out. What do
you think their lives are like when the
cameras turn off?
When all of these people who don't want
them to say what they're saying,
also hear what they're saying?
How do you show gratitude and appreciation towards
them? How do you thank them?
And when you can recognize it just as
added blessing,
that person will feel validated
when you express appreciation,
but your heart is going to soften,
because you know there's somebody
who has done for you in your life
that brings you to this place.
None of you are where you are by
your own volition.
If you believe that, there's fundamentally
a challenge
in
your sense of self.
It might not be the people you wanted
it to be, and I'm sorry if family
didn't do right by you, friends didn't do
right by you. That's not an easy thing.
But there can't be
anyone
in your life that you could say thank
you to.
You can apply it to other things. Why
is it so hard to say I'm sorry?
It's one of the best ways to say
I love you to someone. I'm sorry.
But for what we're talking about tonight,
one of the things you wanna do between
this week and next week,
figure out who that person is.
Write them a thank you letter.
A teacher who did something for you, a
friend who did something for you. You don't
have to share it with them, but step
number 2. And what it'll build is attentive
focus
as what was being said before when I
said, what's in your heart, and you wrote
down with the paper, most of you didn't
have, like, fleeting thoughts pulling you in different
direction, because the exercise
allows for you to have the equivalent of
what's a spotter in a physical exercise.
If your mental strength needs to be built,
the paper in the notebook
is going to equip you to have more
focus than if you were just doing it
without anything there
to kinda keep your mind in a place
where it's anchored. Do you know what I
mean?
And when you start writing this, you're not
gonna wanna stop.
It's like Sayyid bin Wasayid
who is a well known scholar of our
religion.
He says that, I know when my prayer
is just, like, being accepted
because the tears, they're falling, the goosebumps are
riddling my arms, but I don't wanna stop
praying. I just wanna keep praying and keep
praying and keep praying.
So you tap into it,
like, who has done for you?
And it allows for the heart to be
transformed a bit.
And then the other part to that is
that you keep some journals.
Doesn't have to be every day, but every
few days. It's built into our prayer.
Attach reasons to it. You're not just rotely
putting things on your fingers, and I'm gonna
say it to you a bunch of times.
You have to pray your prayers,
but you have to think about why you're
not, what's getting in the way in your
hearts,
and what are you giving an abode in
your heart?
But you can't yield
what is promised through the completion of an
act without doing the act. Do you know
what I mean?
So using this in this way.
There's a couple of other things that we
wanna think about in terms of intention,
but I'll start with that next time.
I wanted to read you one last thing.
This is, like, something my wife shared with
me from
a,
who she was close to, a female scholar,
that was on fasting.
And as we're starting our journey with fast
and intentions,
which is like a physical act. Right? You're
not eating or drinking. If you smoke, no
smoking. You shouldn't smoke. Smoking's bad for you.
Right?
No physical intimacy with your spouse.
But we deepen in our sense of what
we're bringing to the fast.
So the Sheikha, she says,
there are as many forms of fasting
as there are organs of perception and sensation,
and each of these has many different levels.
So we ask to fast from all that
Allah does not love for us,
and to feast on what the
beloved loves for us.
Let us certainly fast from the limited mind
and all that it conjures up.
Let us fast from fear apart from fear
and awe of Allah's majesty.
Let us fast from thinking that we know
when Allah alone is the knower.
Let us fast from thinking negatively of anyone.
Let us fast from our manipulations
and strategies.
Let us fast from all complaint about the
life experiences that Allah gives us. Let us
fast from our bad habits and our reactions.
Let us fast from desiring what we do
not have.
Let us fast from obsession.
Let us fast from
despair. Let us fast from not loving ourself
and from denying our heart. Let us fast
from selfishness and self centered behavior.
Let us fast from thinking that only what
serves us is important.
Let us fast from seeing reality
only from our own point of view. Let
us fast from seeing any reality
other than Allah and from relying on anything
other than Allah. Let us fast from desiring
anything other than Allah and Allah's prophets and
friends and our own true self. Essentially, let
us fast from thinking that we have any
existence
separate from Allah.
That's how I wanna fast this Ramadan.
What's gonna get in the way from making
that happen?
The obstacles inward and out,
what am I carrying in my heart
that when I'm in Ramadan,
I'm gonna now see it potentially as a
burden and a distraction
rather than a source of liberation.
How can I fast when I have my
meeting? You can, man. Just fast when you
have your meeting. That's all you gotta do.
How can I fast when I have a
test or an exam? You can. You just
fast when you have the test or the
exam.
The idea is that it creates enhancement and
focus. Take it from somebody who fast regularly
throughout the year. The days that I fast,
my attentiveness
is more razor sharp than the days that
I don't fast. Because I'm not in a
place where my stomach is defining decisions. I'm
in a place where I'm nurturing
other parts of me that get lost when
my stomach is sovereign over my body.
If you're worried about it, start fasting now.
My kids,
I'm gonna have them fast a couple of
days to practice on the weekends, because I
know they're gonna both come to me and
say, I wanna try to fast, Bubba,
and I'm not gonna make excuses for them.
They wanna do something, I'm gonna try to
help them do it. That's my job as
a parent. My job isn't to, like, make
their decisions.
My job is to make them see the
consequences of their decisions. Right? Last Ramadan,
my kids hung out with a lot of
you all in Ramadan,
and I don't know who sat with them,
but someone told them, in Ramadan, one of
the best things ever is you go to
a diner and you have suhoor before fajr.
And my kids throughout Ramadan, Baba, we gotta
go to a diner, and we gotta have
pancakes and waffles
for before fudger time. I was like, alright.
If you want to,
we went to a diner near our house,
like, an hour before fudger started.
My kids were miserable.
They had their face in the tables.
The food came. They're like, I don't wanna
eat this. Right? And I was like, well,
how do you like suhoor at the diner?
They're like, this isn't fun, papa. Like, we
why did everyone tell us to do this?
I was like, I don't know. But are
we gonna do this again? Are we just
gonna stay at home? Like, we just wanna
be at home. You know? And they're little
kids. So if you ever have a little
kid, it's cute, but it's also just for
them miserable, but for you as the adults,
cute, they're like sleep crying. My son's like,
he's stuffing pancakes in his mouth at the
same time. Right?
Yeah. But, you know, you experience something.
My son is 8 years old. You are
not 8 years old.
Why would you wait till the 1st day?
Why?
What are you thinking?
If you take it seriously and you want
to yield something from it, equip yourself to
know where you stand in relation to it
now, and it's not the same every year.
It shouldn't be because you should have fluctuation.
When I interview people for stuff,
or people wanna work at businesses we own
or nonprofits
or here or whatever, and they show me
resumes.
Like, I got 10 years experience in this
and 20 years of that. It's like, no,
man. You just live the same year 20
times in a row.
That's not the same.
It should not be that every year, it's
the same experience. This is the danger with
ritual. It becomes overtly ritualized as the goal.
It is not difficult to not eat, especially
as the days are getting shorter. Do you
know?
And you have the blessing. You might see
it as what's not there that, oh, daylight
savings time is gonna push the time we
break our fast an hour. It's gonna also
push back the time you start your fast
an hour.
Right? You wanna see what's there. The example
that I like to use is why the
gratitude things come in. I took my kids
to the park, and they want ice cream.
It's ice cream truck, and it's a large
line at the tuck. Both of us both
of them come and meet their truck. 1
of them says, I I don't wanna wait
in the line. The other's like, I'm gonna
wait in the line. We wait in the
line, the kid gets ice cream. We go
back now where the other kid is, but
we shot ice cream too. One of them
saw the ice cream, the other saw the
line.
What do you see
when you are determining how you were readying
yourself for this?
What do you see?
It's a product of what's going on in
here.
Do you get what I mean? I'm not
a terrible dad. Like, don't get me wrong.
Right?
But they have to be equipped to understand
what this religion is about
is not just about, let me teach you
the letters of the Quran
and the forms of the prayer. They gotta
be able to tap in to what makes
them inherently human.
Right? This is why if you were in
the class before this, the 40 hadith class,
last week, we looked at the hadith
where the narrator of the hadith, Noman ibn
Bashir, he's born in Medina. So he's a
child when this verse this hadith
he's listening to is being narrated, and it's
a hadith about the heart.
So as a kid, he's learning about the
heart and its role in his just kind
of movement forward. Do you get what I
mean?
So between this week and next week,
just sit down.
Who is somebody that I can write this
thank you letter to?
Who's somebody I can go and express gratitude?
And you start actually doing it. It's gonna
start to make inside here feel a little
bit different. How do I show appreciation
to Allah, to Allah's Messenger,
to my family, my friends, my community, my
people? Right?
Simple things, it doesn't have to be, like,
super, you know, kind of fancy all the
time. Right?
And then the people I can get away
with not saying thank you to, how do
I start expressing gratitude towards them?
And if you wanna have a one on
one that says,
I don't know how to deal with this
stuff,
that there's no way. Your heart has to
be precious enough
that you don't learn
how to take care of it by watching
a recorded lecture
on YouTube
of an audience that you weren't even seated
in, where someone's talking to a 1,000 people
that you weren't even one of them.
You gotta have people who care about you
enough, and then you have to also care
about yourself enough to cut out excuses.
The number of people who say to me
when I sit with them, I know you're
so busy, that's why I, like, hesitate in
reaching out to you. I'm like, man, I'm
sitting here talking to you right now.
Do not use me as an excuse as
to why you don't get done what you
knew to get done. I don't say that
to them because they're usually not in a
good place when they're talking to me. I'm
saying it to you all right now. Right?
I will make the time,
not because it's a burden, but because I
care about you.
I know what it's like to carry heaviness
inside of me. I know what it's like
to have no one to talk to when
you're trying to figure it out.
So our hadith teaches us that you love
for your brother what you love for yourself.
I like being in a place where I
don't have to carry that kind of stuff
inside of me anymore.
I want you to have that too.
So to dig deeper into it in the
prism of intention,
it doesn't have to be with me. I
can help you find somebody else that you
could talk to also if you need it.
But as you write these thank you letters
in this gratitude journal, we wanna also start
to think out what else is going on
in there. What else am I carrying?
Whether it's for days or it's been for
years, and how do I start to navigate
some of that? Do you get what I
mean? And sometimes, all it is is about
just letting it out in a space
that you can just say whatever you want
to,
you know?
And then you don't have to hold it
all alone.
It's not, like, very solution oriented. It's just
validating the feelings.
So then you're not scared to acknowledge that
they're there, and then what we do is
we detangle them
so that they don't exist in a lump
altogether,
because feelings feel very similar.
So if something made you sad and something
made you grieving,
like the 2 of them can just bleed,
and we want to separate them so that
you can confront them as individual obstacles,
not one giant obstacle. Do you see what
I'm saying?
Does that make sense? Okay. What I like
for you to do is take 2 minutes,
turn the person's next to you. What are
you taking away from this conversation today? What's
some of the things that are coming up?
We'll come back and discuss, and then we'll
wrap up for today. But go ahead.
Yeah. I'll tell them we're
rep
Okay. So what are some of the things
we're taking away from today
just as we wrap up?
Anything that's coming up for people?
Incentives does not it's like
when you have
Yeah. Amazing.
Other thoughts? Anything?
Yeah.
I feel like definitely,
clean I like, you know, especially this whole
conversation that I just, you know, gain more
knowledge where it's, like, clean actually cleaning your
heart is actually way more important than I
originally thought it was.
Right? Because, like, you know, usually, we use
we say, like, you know, during Ramadan, we
say, oh, you know, I'm gonna fix all
my mental issues around my baggage or whatever.
And we say it lightly.
Right? But these are actually way bigger and
way more important than it is because it
affects everything that you do. Right? Whether it
be how the way you think or the
way you act,
the mannerisms,
how you view yourself, confidence,
and so on and so forth. So that's
why I feel like definitely, like, you know,
this was a good thing where it's like,
I kinda learned a little bit more, like,
you know, how I should prioritize
certain things. Amazing. Great. Anyone else before we
wrap up?
We take away from today.
Yeah. Well, like, prophet Muhammad to
give him, like, that open heart surgery and
clean his heart. Believe
as, like,
lay people, we don't have that.
So, like, said, you have to clean out
your heart. You have to do it often.
And I feel like it's something that people
don't do. So
Yeah. This is where you bring intention. Right?
Recitation of Quran.
It's
like a mechanism for this. Acts of kindness
and charity.
It's a mechanism. Like, think about this. Right?
Think think, like, about the world you live
in.
Do you know people who volunteer a lot?
Like, who go visit the sick in the
hospitals
and do these kind of stuff? Do they
tend to be, like, jerks? No. Right? Like,
those are pretty much the nicest people. The
ones who you're like, what did you do
this weekend?
I, you know, went to visit people in
the hospital who weren't feeling so well. Are
they related to you? No. Like, do you
know them?
No. They're just doing that.
But the doing of it is indicative of
what's in their heart. But also when they
do it, it's doing something for their heart.
Do you get what I mean? Right? So
these are all things you can do. This
is what Ramadan is, increased charity, recitation of
the Quran,
like, remembrance of God,
prayer, fasting.
Like, you bring the intention
to do the act for what it's intended
to achieve,
which is not as an ends, but a
means to something. So it's transformative
of your inner self, and it's calling you
to something that's not a sociological identity variable,
but it's like a set of convictions and
belief. Right? So you have to determine, do
I really, like, believe in this thing to
the extent that I am gonna get up
before fudger?
Because I believe that the meal before fudger
has buddha in it. It's got blessing.
And then the blessing allows for me
to be able to carry forward in the
rest of my day. Do you know?
Next week, we're gonna kinda,
build off of this a little bit more,
talk about habit formation,
why we do some of the things that
we do, you know, from a different standpoint,
get into, like, consciousness,
which is an Arabic word,
that gets associated often
with, like, the practice of fasting in the
Quran. It's associated
it's
associated with the reading of the Quran itself.
Sorry. The practice of fasting,
the recitation of Quran, other things. So we
build a relationship with the concept. Right? Because
you can look through
all kinds of books,
and there's so many people,
You know, Omid ibn Al Khattab, who's the
2nd caliph of Islam and a companion of
the prophet, he has a definition of what
taqwa is. He talks about it as if
one is walking through, like, a
kind of,
area that has,
you know,
growth with thorns.
Right?
And you're walking delicately so your clothes
don't get caught on the thorns. Right? There's
mindfulness
of the situation around you.
But, Sofiana Thode,
who comes a generation later,
he also has a definition
of what is.
Hassanal Basri also has a definition,
like others have definitions.
None of them are saying this is what
the person said, so that's what it is.
But they're building a unique relationship with the
concept.
They can identify and define for themselves
this word has meaning to me in this
way. Do you get what I mean? So
the value isn't in memorization
or just a quote.
The value is in building relationship
with the concept
and to be able to understand how it
informs
and how do I elevate it and escalate
it. Do you know what I mean? Who
cares if you can quote,
like, the articles of faith in Islam
and just repeat it
when you don't know, like, where Iman exists
within you, faith, and what does faith look
like? Do you know what I mean? Like,
what's the point of taqwa?
What is it meant to be doing for
me? And why is it something that is
much needed in the world right now? So
we're gonna talk about that.
On Monday 19th,
which is President's Day,
which is, like, a few weeks from now,
this building is closed.
I don't know what we're gonna do that
day.
There's a good chance we're just not gonna
meet that day.
But, also, we might meet in my apartment
building. For some of you have been, like,
in the summers, we do a Monday night,
halika's there.
We have, like, dinners at our place often.
Right? Some of you have been over.
We'd love to have all of you over,
you know, for different stuff. But,
I'll keep people updated and let you know
by next week what's gonna happen there. But
just keep that in the back of your
mind.
And then there might be an option that
we just do it on Zoom if we're
not able to do it in person because
of space constraints.
Okay. Great. So let's take a pause here.
So we'll see everybody next Monday,
and we'll pick up from there.