Khalid Latif – Learning to Love in a Healthy Way
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AI: Transcript ©
Bismillah.
It was interesting with the Abu Lahab. He
said when you get up there, you should
talk for 25, 30 minutes.
I'm looking at the row in front of
us. His brothers got their hands in their
face. They try not to fall asleep.
I think it's very ironic that in a
conference that's based on love,
has no love for the people in this
room.
I want them to stay up till the
middle of the night. Be miserable.
So
I'm gonna go through a few things pretty
quick.
I know the time is getting late.
And just
wanna
first thank you all for
being willing in the midst of so much
of what the world is going through to
come to a gathering like this.
We wanna be able to understand this as
a basis to the conversation that we're gonna
have.
It's very easy
to bring
bodies together in a physical sense.
And the way a lot of our society
functions, there's so many motivations and catalysts that
bring us together
in terms of externals.
So you could fill entire corporate
buildings, companies,
people are bringing you together based off of
salaries and wealth.
You could go to so many different arenas
that bring people together based off of elements
of things that are materialistic.
When we talk about love for the sake
of Allah,
it's a key ingredient in being able to
now bring together
individuals, not on something that is rooted in
an external, but it's a key ingredient in
being able to bring people together in terms
of something internal? How do you bring hearts
together?
You want to root this conversation
in our most primordial state of existence.
In an Adamic narrative of creation,
we are taught of so many things that
are interjected
for the first time that are deeply problematic
in terms of things that are real,
real sin. May Allah protect us from it.
Iblis, he is
without fail,
identified as being arrogant,
told to prostrate to Adam alaihis salaam and
everything does
say the Bliss.
Flawed logic and absence of knowledge,
deep arrogance, the first racist,
And you see this now start to trickle
down
as the narrative continues.
Adham alayhis salaam,
he is now in this earthly realm of
existence,
and you see progeny start to be established.
And literally
from the same womb,
2 brothers are born.
In our
tradition,
Gabil and Habil,
Cain and Abel,
and they interject
a deep sin for the first time, which
quite often is identified simply as murder.
But it's deeper than that. And you have
to think about it in the prism of
loving for the sake of Allah,
because we are all children of Adam.
And being Banu Adam, it means that we
have a shared heritage that transcends
race and ethnicity,
class and culture.
When you think now, in the immediate of
these 2 individuals
being born,
it's not simply murder that's taking place, but
it's an act of fratricide,
a brother killing a brother.
How many people do you think were alive
in the world at the time that Habil
takes the life of Habil?
Just picture in your head.
It's not a lot of people.
And if the world at that time, where
you can count the number of people in
existence
on your hands,
is still too small for individuals
who came out of the same womb
to be able to tolerate each other in
such a way
where desire, lust, envy does not now take
precedent
over things like compassion,
mercy, and love, what are we gonna do
when there's billions of us?
But it shouldn't be lost
in a discussion on love
and love for the sake of Allah.
That the first act
of atrocity committed in this earthly realm of
existence
is an act of fratricide.
A brother killing a brother, and it's the
same thing that happens every day, again and
again and again,
echoing through centuries of existence
until today.
When you have this
construct, this phrase of love for the sake
of Allah, there's 2 terms rooted in it
that a lot of us don't have familiarity
with.
1 is the word love.
What does it mean to you?
I want you to think within yourself.
How did you learn
what it means to love somebody?
Who taught you that?
And as you think about how it is
that you learned,
because a lot of you never learned how
to do it.
The way somebody taught you 2 +2 equals
4, the way somebody broke down certain types
of curricula to you, nobody ever sat down
and said, this is what love looks like.
This is how you love in a healthy
way.
I want you to think in a second
reflection point,
beyond today, going into many tomorrows,
when was the first time you actually felt
loved in your life?
Real love
without condition, without qualification.
May Allah
never make us from amongst those who feel
unloved.
And may Allah never let us be those
who let the people around us feel unloved.
Yes. Think about it on a real level,
a practical level.
The very onset Iblis can interject now a
sin that kills a brother from another brother,
and you can see within a room that
diversity is not something that's meant to be
a checkbox.
It's not a congratulation
that you can pat yourself on the back
that says that, hey, there's one black person
that comes to my masjid.
But then I have a friend that comes
from a different walk of life.
But you allow for yourself to think deeply.
What does it mean to both love and
then to deepen that love within a prism
that says it is for the sake of
the divine.
The verse that went along with this session
and its description from Surat Al-'Al Imran, that
many of us know,
That all of you hold fast to the
rope of Allah. It's a verse that speaks
to us about brotherhood, diversity,
etcetera, etcetera.
The things that get in the way that
got in the way of Kabil's heart are
the same things that get into your heart,
which is the thing that's function is to
love.
So if you have a desire or lust,
you have something that catalysts and motivates you
to be able to explain
why you are distant from other people, the
rest of creation.
Why the basis of your bond is not
rooted in something like compassion and mercy,
real Mahaba?
Is gonna come back to you in some
capacity.
I wanna give you a few different reasons
as to why sometimes there's obstacles.
One,
the heart, it just loves
and it's gonna love what you tell it
it's supposed to love and what it is
that you put in its presence.
So if you talk to yourself in a
way that says,
my sense of self is rooted
based off of whether I have a ring
on my finger or not, or whether my
child has a ring on their finger, whether
they have a big home, or this many
cars, or this many children.
My sense of self is rooted not just
in who I invite to my home, but
who I would never let come to my
home, who would never break fast with me.
How can you have
a deep love
for just humanity
on a whole, when a society that is
rooted in materialistic
existence
necessitates you having to be away from others
so you could care less what somebody else
has to not have in order for you
to have as much as you have.
So I don't wanna think about everybody else
who has to exist without means so that
I can wear what I wear.
I can drive what I drive.
I can eat what I eat.
I don't want to think about what it
means that I'm able to live in certain
parts of cities with certain amounts of funding
going to certain schools and the roads are
paved in certain ways and there's security in
certain ways, but the other part of the
town that I never go to, I don't
wanna think about that.
I don't wanna think about what it means
that for me to live in the house
that I live in, gentrification
necessitates
pushing out generations of families that have lived
in these neighborhoods for a long
time.
You can love and it has nothing to
do with God.
Or you can love with the presence of
the divine,
both inwardly and then manifesting outwardly,
that recognizes a shared humanity
and says that I'm Muslim,
I'm supposed to do it different from everybody
else.
It's not gonna happen if you think more
about what people will say
based off of who you invite into your
homes or not.
If you have ever told someone in your
family that they shouldn't be friends with someone
from a certain race or ethnicity,
if you tolerate not allowing people to marry
someone from a different culture,
these are not indications of love for the
sake of God.
If you are in a place where you
can hear people get on the stage and
ask you to donate to support orphans who
have nothing, they have nobody to look after
them,
And in your head, all it is that
you're thinking is, let this person get off
the stage.
You are witness to yourself as to what
your heart is inclined towards.
And you have to reflect introspectively,
not with self deprecation,
because to get to a destination
necessitates being real on where do I actually
stand in relation to it.
The obstacle of the dunya is real. May
Allah protect us from it.
A second obstacle that's critical to understand.
It's really hard to love somebody else when
you don't love yourself.
I can't fully, completely have a love for
you
when I really dislike me.
The hadith that says that you love for
your brother what you love for yourself
is rooted in an idea of being able
to have
recognition of a common good and wanting for
others certain things, but it also ends with
an idea
that you love things for yourself.
Do you like the person that you are?
Does the way that you treat people
help them to also
find a sense of love for themselves?
Your rhetoric,
your talk,
the conversations that you have, ours was the
prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam
who took people in a community
that nobody wanted anything to do with,
helped them to recognize what was inherently good
with in them and empower them based off
of it. The kind of people that we
would never think could have a love based
relationship with God.
The companion comes to take the Hud punishment
for drinking.
When people spoke poorly of him, what does
our messenger say?
Don't say those things. He loves Allah and
his messenger.
He's helping that person
to not give in to the nonsensical
thoughts of those that are around,
and to understand that there's something good within
you.
It's gonna be hard to see beauty in
others if you can't see your own light,
if you cannot embrace your own
luminosity.
And it's one of the biggest
variables
that come into
our lives that keeps us from really loving
all those that are around us, I don't
really like things about me,
and I don't know what to do with
it.
If you are an elder in this room,
you have to be beyond smart as to
how you talk to young people.
And not just young who are children,
but young who are younger than you. So
even if you are 80 and the youngster
is now 60, they still
have impact from your words.
So don't point out people's flaws only.
Don't let them only hear as to why
you think they make mistakes.
If you have never told a young person
in your life that you love them,
remember who your teacher is, sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
You can take the abstract and theoretical
that comes from the microphone
over to you and just go in one
ear and out the other, or think about
how it's transformative
of me.
And a lot of what we pass on
to others is only what we possess in
the 1st place. So if nobody told you
they were proud of you, it might be
harder for you to sell somebody that you're
proud of them. If people constantly
pushed you down and critiqued you and hurt
you, I'm sorry. They should not have talked
to you like that.
But you gotta disrupt the cycle
and you gotta follow in those prophetic footsteps.
One of the hardest
things to overcome, but is necessary,
is to be able
with confidence
and appreciation
of everything Allah has given to us,
is to actually start to chip away at
the parts of myself that I don't like.
And once I can learn to love me
and everything, my strengths and non strengths,
it's gonna be a lot easier for me
to go out and love a world that
is very different for me.
But if I'm more prone to wrestle and
struggle with my own insecurities
and not know how to overcome my mistakes,
it's going to build up and I'm just
going to see what's wrong with everybody else
constantly.
I'm going to put barriers where there's not
supposed to be barriers.
They're gonna come in the way.
How do you start to overcome it on
a practical level?
How do you start to look at it
deeply within yourself?
It can be hard to do on your
own,
so surround yourself with good people.
Allow for yourself
to be in a place where you can
recognize the need for positive voices in your
life.
Spaces where you can self express.
To be in gatherings that are gatherings that
are rooted in shared internals.
I love coming to Miftah events
because I love hanging out with the Wahid
brothers.
They're just nice people, man.
And I've been in numerous spaces with different
people all over the world.
And I could tell you, when you find
people
who help uplift your inside,
you're gonna wanna fly across the country to
just spend moments with them.
And then, you take that invigorated
spirit and you go back to your own
spaces
because this is Quran.
That is a reward for beauty, anything other
than beauty. It perpetuates itself.
And you go and you go and you
become that catalyst of light. You become that
catalyst of real goodness and beauty.
You start to bring in a much needed
love that is categorized
as
being rooted in something that is for the
sake of the divine.
And our God is a God
that loves us, not just because of who
we are, but He loves us because of
who He is, a zohjud.
You seek to embody that within yourself,
and you just gotta love people because they're
people.
You love humanity
because you share humanity with them.
It goes back to what I was saying
to you in the beginning.
How did you learn how to love in
the beginning?
How did you learn
how to implement it for yourself? Who taught
it to you? Where did it come from?
If we went 1 by 1 by 1,
most of us stopped learning how to treat
others
by the time we were in kindergarten.
After that,
the curricula was just rooted in something that
was about the pursuit of something
rooted in the dunya, wealth.
The conversations around ethics and values, they stop.
Why does so much of the Quran talk
about how we're supposed to treat people?
Why are there so many hadith about character,
ethics,
values?
So you gotta
break out of the classes that are just
on the hara. You know how to make
wudu now.
You gotta be empowered at the fact that
your teachers have taught you the fic that
you need for where you are in your
life. And where you are at this juncture,
you gotta start tapping into the rest of
yourself and just start thinking deeply. Do I
treat people well?
The elders, the youngsters,
people who are my neighbors,
Is love the basis of what's coming from
me?
If you don't even know what the word
means,
how are you going to be able to
answer that question?
When you go home from this place tonight,
I want you to take out a notebook
and just write at the top of it,
what does love mean to me? What does
it look like?
And then just write for yourself an answer.
And I want you to think about who
are the people that I love in my
life.
And be real. Be honest. Not the ones
you're supposed to say, but the ones that
you actually love. Who are they?
It might be a hard reflection question, but
I want you to think about
who is it that makes me feel loved.
Where are the spaces that I go
where I feel loved?
Do the people that I love actually know
that I love them?
Because you know the hadith as well as
I do. Our messenger
tells his companions,
you love that person. Go tell them you
love them.
When was the last time you did that?
You've ever been for Hajj?
It's an amazing
experience.
May Allah
enable us to be invited back to his
house, in the house,
and the illuminated city of his messenger,
May Allah end all of the oppression and
injustice that comes out of those countries.
I've gone to Medina and Mecca,
and there
are millions of people that are there purely
for the sake of Allah. Now the other
end of the construct.
And I've sat down
in gatherings
of people that I don't know
and never will meet again, likely, from all
corners of the world.
I've sat down and had conversations
with people who don't speak my language and
I don't speak their language,
but we still were able to communicate
because we were there for the sake of
Allah
and being there for the sake of Allah
is what informed the love that we had
for each other.
And I can still see the faces of
people that I sat with in certain parts
of the Haram, in certain prayers.
You wanna start to identify for yourself
and that other end of this as you
start to reflect on what does love mean
for the sake of Allah.
Who is Allah to me?
Because you can dress man the way somebody
else dresses,
and you can eat what somebody else eats.
You can even go through the motions of
prayer the way somebody else prays. It's not
hard to prostrate with your body, but if
you want to start prostrating with your heart,
you want to start prostrating with the rest
of you,
you have to think for yourself,
who is the god that I worship?
Who do I know Allah to be?
You can't believe something just because somebody else
believes it.
Faith
can be reasonable. It's not always just religious
and spiritual.
You came into this place, and you believed
that there would be lights in it, there's
chairs to sit in,
there's certain things that we have conviction in,
And the same yakin that you have in
these day to day occurrences,
water's gonna come out my faucet.
You gotta believe in God, not just like
that, but also believe in God's love like
that.
He tells you he is Al Wadud.
So when anybody says, how do you know
Allah loves you?
See, because he says he is the source
of love.
And then you reflect and you deepen.
I am as my servant thinks I am.
If I asked you who is Allah to
you, what would you say?
And then the 2 unfamiliars
going together,
I don't know what love means.
I don't know if I actually even love
anybody.
I don't even know if anybody really loves
me.
I love you.
I know these brothers who put this conference
on, they love you.
I know they're gonna
get to places
early tomorrow,
and they're not even gonna think twice about
it. Sheikh Abdullah was on this stage,
and he was speaking
while his flight is an hour
to departure,
so that he can transit to another city
and catch an early morning flight back to
his city.
So he's just teaching more people there.
He loves you.
If you don't know,
and then you also don't know who Allah
is to you,
other things are going to then start governing
your decision making,
your choices.
And it's not gonna be for the sake
of God,
but it's still gonna be in motivation of
something.
And whatever that other thing is,
it's not gonna give you the solace,
the balance, the contentment
that doing something out of love will give
to you.
That's why you have to do it for
the sake of your own heart.
I'm gonna tell you one more thing. I
know
said this,
and this is really gonna be the last
thing I'm gonna tell you.
We're
Muslim.
And you could be like,
obviously, yes. We are.
But we're meant to be
a little bit different from everybody else.
We're not meant to just go into our
houses of worship and be with ourselves,
but it's meant to be transformative, and then
we go out and leave the world a
little bit better.
I want you to think just about how
amazing this is,
that you are seated where you are seated
right now.
My grandfathers,
both of my grandfathers,
6 foot 4,
tall, Kashmiri Punjabi men.
My grandmothers were both 5 foot tall. You
could tell what end of the gene pool
I landed on.
After partition,
my father's family moved to Lahore. They lived
in Guadalmandi,
if any of you have ever been there.
And the house they lived in
was probably the length of this stage.
Doubled,
2 rooms.
My grandfather,
my father's father,
he
would ride a bike
to a bank where he was a teller,
and then come home and have my dad
and my uncle
sit outside
under a street lamp because they had no
electricity in their house, where they studied to
become doctors.
Because when you live under colonization,
there's not a lot of things that you
can do where you don't have to answer
to somebody who tells you that your way
of life is backwards.
And for many people, becoming a doctor was
a way to not have to answer to
that kind of nonsense.
And I think about my grandfather
and in our collective history
that incorporates
the realities of colonization,
of slavery,
of imperialism,
supremacy
impacting
so many of our lives.
I want you to think about your ancestors
and people that you are connected to,
going back generations
as much as you can.
You think any of them would think that
you'd be sitting right now in California in
a gathering like this?
Khabab ibn Arit Umar
ibn Al Khattab saw him with his back
covered 1 uncovered, blisters and scars.
And this is a man who asked the
prophet, why don't you make du'a for us?
Ask Allah to give us victory.
And when he is seen *, to give
you context,
Umar
says, how did this happen? And he says,
in the early years of persecution,
they used to make me lay on a
bed of flaming coals.
I was forced to stay there until the
blood from my back extinguished the flames.
And he's now asking the prophet,
why don't you make dua for us?
Why don't you ask Allah to give us
victory?
And our prophet
tells him to not say such things, but
this is not contrary to his being a
source of mercy because what else is he
gonna say that you're right, we don't have
what it takes.
We're not gonna be able to overcome these
struggles?
Is he gonna say, no, Youhabaab,
today is hard,
but tomorrow will be better.
What do you think people like Khabab ibn
'Aret were thinking
when the prophet delivers a farewell sermon to
a 120,000
plus companions?
When they can walk into the city of
Mecca
and with real love,
not even have to cause pain or hurt
to any of their persecutors.
Everybody's forgiven.
What do you think?
Now, I want you to think about people
who are in your heritage that struggled,
that went across entire
planes of this worldly existence
so that you can get to where you
are right now.
My grandfather likely could never imagine that I'd
be standing where I am at this moment.
And not know what he had to go
through and the people before him had to
go through. My family's from Kashmir. May Allah
end the occupation there and end the occupation
in Palestine and make us a people who
in our generation
see a free Kashmir and a free Palestine.
I can tell you what keeps me going
every day
is real love.
I love the people of my community.
I love the people of my city.
I'm gonna get up and do whatever I
can to keep going.
And it's not because I don't get tired,
but the positivity
can give an energy
unlike anything that negativity
brings to you.
So you might not be getting done only
what you uniquely can
because what's missing is that love.
And so you take everything that our teachers
taught us on this stage today,
and you bring it back to you
because your heart is yours. Nobody else will
choose your choices.
You think, how does this love factor in
my life?
How do I start to build it and
spread it and motivate through it?
And in the midst of
so much darkness,
where people are everyday forgotten,
I'm gonna share as much light as I
can,
much love as I can,
as much of myself as I can.
I'm not gonna do it in expectation of
anything in return
Because that's what somebody who's motivated by love
really does.
You just do it because your heart's telling
you to do it, and every part of
your body wants to just do it.
And the secret is that that's what the
reward is at the end of it
to get to that place.
Sheikh Mohammed Yaqubi,
may Allah preserve him,
he once
said that
the entire point of all of this
is for us to just recognize
Allah's love for
us. And that you spend your entire existence
in just realization of that love.
The prohibitions,
the obligations,
the boundaries, whatever else is all because of
god's love.
And so don't let the ritual be the
goal, but make it a means to something.
And let yourself then deepen in it, grow
in it. It can be scary and intimidating,
but once you embrace it, it'll give you
an unbounded
courage, the ability to be bold in your
audacity.
Then you follow in the footsteps of the
best of creations.
What better footsteps to follow in?
If I can ever be helpful to any
of you in anything you have going on,
please don't hesitate in reaching out.
It
would be my honor
to be able to assist in whatever it
is that I can.
But if this is the only time that
we are meant to be together,
then I pray,
Insha'Allah, Allah
gathers us all together again in the best
of places in the world beyond this one.
Please keep me in your duas.
You and your loved ones will be in
mine always.
May Allah
guide us and protect us. May he bless
us with knowledge that benefits us. May he
bless us with the tawfiq to understand and
implement that knowledge into our daily lives. May
he God bless us all.
Asked me to make dua.
It's a dangerous thing.
Give you a perspective. I was making dua
the other day, and my 9 year old
daughter was sitting in my lap.
And the poor girl fell asleep because of
the length of the.
If you wanna put your heads down, go
for it.
I want you to recenter yourself just as
we make.
Really believe in a god that is listening.
I know we've been sitting for a while,
but center yourself to the space.
Allow for yourself to not just be physically
present, but present in every sense of who
it is that you are.
Allah
will accept for us our dua and grant
us even better than what it is that
we are asking of him.
We begin this supplication in your name, You
Allah,
and beseech you to send your choices salutations
upon your most beloved, sallallahu ta'ala, alayhi wa
sallam.
We ask that you shower your infinite mercy
upon this
gathering, granting each and everyone who is present
here in and our loved ones, only the
best in this world and the best in
the next.
We ask you allah that if all of
us are meant to be together only at
this time, at this place,
whether we are young or old, male or
female, regardless of our race, our ethnicity, our
social class,
our country of origin, our cultural heritage,
whether we are Muslim or come from a
different walk of life,
for individual hearts are meant to be in
the presence of all of their hearts that
are gathered here only at this time at
this place,
then gather us all together again in the
best of places in the world beyond this
one.
We turn to you, you Allah,
you who are the source of life, of
truth, of sustenance, and love.
We turn to you at the end of
this auspicious
gathering
in pursuit of true knowledge and understanding.
Make us from the wise, yarrabbi, who implement
everything that it is that we have learned,
and those who seek out only wisdom.
Grant us contentment that only wisdom can, a
contentment that escapes so many.
Thank you for all those you have placed
into our lives who have spoken words of
truth, love, and wisdom to us even when
we didn't want to hear them.
Grant us the wisdom to know when you
are using someone to speak instruction into our
hearts and the strength and courage to follow
through with that guidance even when it's difficult.
Grant us wisdom that does not lead us
simply to wealth in the world, but leads
us to real love and understanding.
In our pursuit of knowledge, make us those
who find that which our hearts are in
need of.
And guide us always as we travel this
world with an ever increasing thirst for real
truth.
It is usually the ignorant who believe they
always know,
the unaware who think they understand.
Make us those who are always in pursuit
of growth and never satisfied with where we
currently stand.
Make us those who increase in our wisdom
through sound reflection and contemplation,
and keep us from becoming those who only
gain understanding through experience.
Grant us a deep control over our emotions,
and never let us become those whose anger
overpowers our intelligence.
To know others is intelligence, but to know
ourselves is hikmah, real wisdom.
To exert control over others is a sign
of strength, but to be able to control
ourselves is real power.
Make us from the strongest of the believers,
and let us never be those who gain
the world at the expense of losing our
souls.
As we leave from this conference, grant us
strength of all kinds.
Put barakah and tawfiq into each of our
endeavors.
Put into our beings a desire for nothing
less than true excellence, and to push ourselves
to try our very best.
Let each of us excel at all that
it is that we do,
and with each success in this world, grant
us more success in regards
to the world beyond this one. For all
those who have come here, You Rabbi, bless
us always.
Make us those who act only with knowledge
and to never leave any knowledge that we
have been given and acted upon.
Show us how to use it with wisdom,
to use it to bring benefit to this
world and all those who are in it,
and to be a means of benefit for
us in the world beyond this one. Help
us to use what it is that we
have learned in our time here, everything that
we have acquired,
as well as the relationships that we have
built
to make this world a little bit better
in ways that only we uniquely can.
My brothers and sisters who have gathered here
look forward
from this place.
Help them to look with foresight,
and let their foresight be rooted in courage.
Never fear.
Let each one who is assembled here meet
the future with hope, and make them the
hope that we need for our futures to
be filled with love, life, and light.
Send them only those who will be their
helpers and supporters,
and protect them always from any harm or
tribulation,
any affliction, anxiety, or anguish.
Make them those who are never afraid to
dream.
Give them inspiration
to work towards achieving each of their heart's
aspirations
to find strength through service of your creation,
success in each failure.
Increase each one of them in knowledge that
is beneficial,
and protect them from that knowledge that does
not benefit them or any of those that
are around them.
Help them, you, Allah, to deepen their beneficial
knowing,
to know their strengths and to live by
them, To know their character and how to
increase it. To know their
never let them feel any pain.
But if they do, then help them to
know how to heal from it.
To know their value and how to share
it. To know their blessings and how to
be grateful for them. To know their wants
and to see where they conflict with their
needs, to know their shortcomings and how to
confront and defeat them, to know how to
really forgive all that has wronged them and
actually forgive them, to know how to seek
forgiveness from those that they have wronged and
to actually forgive them,
To know what charity is by being generous
with their wealth and their time. To know
what integrity is by being honest and truthful.
And to know what goodness is by extending
their hands without qualification
to all those who are in need.
Help each and everyone who has come into
this space to know who it is that
they are and not let the people they
are today be afraid to ever meet the
people they can be tomorrow.
Help them to truly know themselves better each
day they are in this world.
And through that understanding, you Allah,
help them to better themselves in their knowing
of you and your mercy,
to know you and your love.
Perfect them inwardly and to always be in
control of their hearts.
Make them from amongst those who live with
true contentment every day of their lives,
and grant them an abode in the place
of ultimate contentment in the world beyond this
one.
Allow for their beings to always be filled
with self love so they may go out
and share that love with others
rather than a love of themselves that keeps
them from doing all that they are able
to do.
When their hearts are heavy and they are
filled with darkness,
bring people to them who illuminate them through
kindness, compassion, and love.
Make them always the reason that people have
hope in this world,
never the reason that people might dread it.
Help them to see this world always through
hearts that are drawn towards goodness,
to see the goodness in all those who
are around them and within themselves,
and to never be those who elevate themselves
by denigrating others,
to see the benefit in any challenge that
comes their way,
and to not pass on a gift that
can only be acquired through patience and perseverance.
Help all of us, you allah,
to silence fear and abolish anxiety,
to overpower indifference and break away from greed,
to eliminate arrogance and defeat racism,
to be bold enough to ask of you,
to make us those who only do that
which is good.
Make us those who find real peace and
real love,
and not just the semblance of it.
Those who give real peace and real love,
and not just the facade of it.
Make our motivation
always selflessness,
not selfishness,
sincerity, and never self centeredness.
Because those who always follow goodness
Help us to be patient and forgiving and
to always visit the sick, to respect our
elders and to give of our wealth, to
be just in all of our dealings and
to be honest and trustworthy,
to be gentle and loving and to take
care of those who are in need, to
always love for others what we love for
ourselves.
Help us to speak good and only good
and to otherwise be silent,
to respect and honor all human beings irrespective
of their religion, color, race, gender, language, status,
property, birth, profession, or class.
Make us those who remember always the sacrifices
that others made so that we could be
where we are today.
Make not the pursuit of this world our
goal, but let our goals be for the
best in the next world.
Help us to sustain everything that we have
learned in these hours that we have spent
together
and to share what it is that we
take from this place to all those that
we will meet.
Give us confidence that helps us to see
our strengths as well as our weaknesses, and
protect us from arrogance, which lets us only
see weaknesses,
and protect us from arrogance, which lets us
only see weakness in the world around us.
Give us the courage to reach our potential
and protect us from the fear that keeps
us from doing so.
Let our goals be gradual and consistent,
and help us to strive every day even
if it is very little.
Enrich our lives with the richness of our
souls.
Grant us companionship that helps us to reach
our best, and keep us from companions that
hold us back.
Grant us friends who encourage us towards all
that is good, and keep us from friends
who take us towards that which is not.
Arrange our hearts with those hearts that are
gentle and tender,
and make us amongst those whose presence brings
benefit and relief.
Make the Quran our guide and grant us
a deep understanding
of it. Make the sunnah our goal both
inward and outward aspects of it.
Make our prayer our anchor, granting us the
true sweetness that only salah and dua can.
Make the best of our deeds the last
of our deeds.
Let us not leave this world other than
in a state that is most pleasing to
you.
Y'all accept our dua.
Y'all accept our dua.
You Allah, accept our dua.
You Allah, by the barakah of this gathering,
accept our dua.
You Allah, by the presence of the righteous
that are here, accept our dua.
You Allah, by the sincerity of the most
sincere that are here, accept our dua.
A special dua,
for our brothers and sisters at the Miftah
Institute,
for all of our teachers who came and
shared the stage,
for every volunteer who has given up their
time,
as well as all of those people who
we might not ever think about or
really know that they exist.
The people who put the chairs out that
we're sitting in.
The ones who put out the tables and
the cloth and served us the meals that
we had,
those who cooked it with their hands,
all those who played a role in facilitating
any part of this gathering, yarab.
Give to them only the best in this
world and the best in the next,
And help us to truly understand, you allah,
that you put entire
armies of people in motion
just so we can be where we're seated
at this moment,
how can we not recognize the love you
have for us?
Bless all of them, You Rabbi,
Protect us always from hearts that are not
humble, tongues that are not wise, and eyes
that have forgotten how to cry.
Forgive us for our shortcomings
and guide and bless us all.