Khalid Latif – Ramadan Immersion 2022
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AI: Transcript ©
I think we're
live streaming both through the Vimeo app as
well as YouTube, Michelle.
This is where we're getting started.
Maybe we can
utilize the opportunity for people. I had some
people who had sent me
some duas that they wrote,
utilizing
the divine name of.
And if you remember, we looked at Ar
Rahman, Ar Rahim, Arham Ar Rahimin, Khairur Rahimin,
Dhur Rahma.
We looked at Al Malik, Al Malik, Al
Malik.
And then last week, we looked at Al
Afu
in reference to the dua that many of
us likely know within these days and nights
of Ramadan.
Or and we talked about what that meant
a little bit.
Did anybody actually write more of the duas
whether you sent it to me or not?
If you wanna share with your classmates,
just so we could hear and benefit from
everyone's
experiences with that.
You can feel free to paste it, copy
paste it into the chat box,
if you'd written anything on Alafu
or any reflections on any of the names
that we've looked at so far.
Those that were
taken,
in the 1st week that we discussed around
Rahma
or those that we looked at in terms
of.
Okay.
And is there any particular part of the
that you look at?
So sister,
she said that she for it, she looks
into the male.
So Shema has written here,
I am a sinner. My heart is broken
due
my heart is broken due to it.
I ask you to forgive me and save
me from myself. You are the only one
who can forgive me,
So forgive
me.
Great.
Well, I hope everyone's Ramadan has been going
well. Maybe we can get started. I thought
that in the context of it being Ramadan
and many of us making dua
and likely when we look at the Asma
and Husna,
we tend to look through the ones that
we've spoken about and then kinda go in
a successive order. I thought we could jump
a little bit more.
And
instead of looking at Al Qaduz,
we could look at
one that might resonate a little bit differently
given it's the month of Ramadan,
and look at the divine name of Al
Mujib,
the one who responds.
And
and Mujib
is a very important
name of the divine and many of us
have likely been engaging Allah
in this way where we make dua
to Allah
in these nights of Ramadan.
We are pouring our hearts out. Right? These
last
10 nights in anticipation of Laylatul Qadr, may
Allah make us from those who witness and
benefit from Laylatul Qadr.
And when we think about Al Mujib,
we
understand
in translation,
this is the one who answers prayers, the
ones who answers
duas.
But the fundamental
notion there
necessitates that the duas made in order for
it to be responded to.
Ma'am Ghazali Rahim Allah,
he
says that Allah is Al Mujib,
that this means that it is he who
responds to the request of those who are
asked
by assisting them,
to the call of those who call upon
him by answering them,
and responds to the plight of the poor
with all that they need. Right?
That it is he who responds to the
requests of those who ask by assisting them,
to the call of those who call upon
him by answering them, and responds to the
plight of the poor with all that they
need.
And I'm just gonna write that here in
the chat box so that people can have
that. This is what Imam Ghazari
says
is what,
it means when we call upon Allah's Al
Mujib.
And you wanna think about the way now
we relate to whatever knowledge we have given
to us through the Quran, through the Hadith
of Allah
by he himself
in his divine wisdom
to help us now recognize how we relate
to,
in our limited capacity, our creator,
by not looking at the divine names that
he has taught us to know him better
in isolation of each other, but to see
how they now relate to one another.
And this is a challenge that many of
us have quite often. Right? A generalization that
we can make is that when we're looking
into religion,
quite often,
we look at verses, we look at hadith,
and we don't necessarily think about what they
mean in the context of one another.
So what does it mean that Allah is
al Mujib in the context
of us also knowing that he is al
Rahman?
What does it mean that he is al
Mujib in the context of us knowing that
he is al Rahim,
that he is Al Malik, he is Al
Malik, he is Arhamar Rahimin, that he is
Al A'afoo.
And embedded now within this
idea
of making dua to the divine
and that he is the one who responds,
that response now is not something that we
want to anthropomorphize
God in any capacity.
So it's not, for example, the way I
might call upon my child
while they're watching television and they're distracted and
they don't want to respond to the call,
or I'm asking
of
a friend to do me a favor, or
someone at the end of a long days
of fasting. They're exhausted. They're tired.
And we're asking, can you help clean up
the author? And there's now elements that are
there that are not necessarily
responsive in the ways that we would understand
ideally what that response would look like.
But to deepen in a recognition of what
it means that God is Al Mujib, that
he is the one that responds,
you want to juxtapose this to other divine
names that we know of Allah
that he has taught of us.
So Allah who is Al Mujib, he is
Ar Rahman.
And Ar Rahman not just being mercy in
the ways that we understand
mercy in a system of inequity and injustice.
That one who now is in a place
where someone could
authoritatively
yield power over them in the aftermath of
consequence that is negative,
they exert mercy instead of justice.
Right? Rahma
in Arabic
denotes softness, tenderness,
gentleness.
In addition to compassion, in addition to love,
in addition to mercy.
So
who is Al Mujib?
He is Ar Rahman.
We talked about Allah's Rab.
So he is Al Malik. He is a
Syed. He is Al Qayin.
He is Murabbi, Mudabir.
He
is the mender and healer of all things.
So who is Al Mujib?
Our is Al Mujib.
And you can look at this now in
the context of other divine names as well.
Right? That who is Al Mujib, the one
that you are calling upon?
Well, Allah is Al Aleem. He's the knower
of all things. So if I'm gonna call
upon anyone as Al Mujib, the one that
I want to respond to my prayers,
I wanted to be the one who is
the knower of all things that he knows
all that has transpired. He knows what will
happen, what has happened, and he knows what
could have happened
but did not happen based off of the
course of the ways things actually did happen.
That he is Al Hakim. He is the
most wise. And we'll come back to this
in the context of
recognizing, well, when duas are not responded to
in the ways that we would hope that
they are, we understand that he is Al
Mujib and Al Hakim.
So he is the most wise.
That he is in addition to being Al
Alim, he is a Samir, that he is
the one that hears all things, that he
is al basir. He's the one that sees
all things.
And then you want to think about it
in the context of
other aspects of the divine, other divine names
that we know.
That Allah is
Al Wadud.
He's the source of an unconditional
love.
That if anybody ever asks you, well, how
do you know that God loves you?
You say that God loves us because of
who he tells us that he is. He
says he is.
And his love for us is not because
we come from a particular culture or context
or espouse a certain creed. It's not that
we're of a certain social class or have
certain professions or titles or these kinds of
things. Allah does not love us because of
who we are. Allah loves us because of
who he is. He's alwadood,
a source of an unconditional love that takes
us in in all of our diversity
and embraces us despite any imperfection that we
have just as any perfect love would.
And when you call upon him as the
one who responds to your duas, the ones
that responds to your prayers,
then you call upon him knowing that he
is.
He is the source of that love.
He's the one that knows
everything that you like about yourself and you
dislike about yourself. And despite that, he still
has love for you.
And you add that to so many other
parts. He's the
giver of gifts. He is
the giver of blessing and bounty. He is.
He is free of need.
And just in being able to now extrapolate
meaning from this.
You don't want to going forward. Right? It's
our last time together.
Be in a place where you just memorize
and you say that here I will only
understand this in one frame.
But you start to understand divine names that
you are given,
through
the prism of other divine names that we
have been taught and we have been exposed
to through the Quran, through the hadith,
through
our ability
to deepen now in understanding
who is the one that responds to our
prayers
and connecting now at a deeper level
through a recognition
of
what those things
mean as we are calling upon him.
I'd love to take a pause just to
hear any thoughts or reflections to make sure
that we're all on the same page here.
Do you get what I'm saying? Right? Why
it's important to not just think about
one of these divine names in isolation, but
to start to think about them in the
context of more as you learn them.
You know, when you engage in reflection and
contemplation,
what does it mean that Al Khaleq, the
creator,
is also Al Mujib,
the responder to prayers? What does it mean
in these ways
when we are
recognizing
and deepening in our relationship with our creator?
You're making a lot of dua
in Ramadan. Right? May Allah accept all of
our dua
and grant us even better than what it
is that we are asking of him. And
may he make us from amongst those who
are content with his decree.
So thinking now about on the receiving end
of dua,
al Mujib
definitively
is the one who responds. Right? We'll call
it
a That your lord says make dua to
me. Right?
Make dua to me.
I will respond. This is divine
promise.
I remember going to the haram
for Umrah, for Hajj.
We were standing in the top floor of
the Kaaba, if you ever been there, the
highest floor. Right? And Allah
enable us to visit his house in Makkah
al Mukarama again and to visit the illuminated
city, Medina
to Munawara,
the city of the prophet alaihi salam again.
May he end any of the injustices and
oppressions that come out
from the countries that house these robotic cities.
I was standing at the top
floor looking down at the Kaaba, there's millions
of people just pouring their hearts out. Right?
I remember the first time I went for
Hajj in 2,005,
I was
23
years old.
And I had just started working at our
Islamic Center at New York University,
And at the onset of it, I had
said I wanna make Hajj going into the
establishment of this career because I wanna thank
Allah for giving me the opportunity to serve
a community
as well as ask of him to put
barakah into whatever endeavors might come. And so
when I went for Hajj if you ever
been for Hajj, like, it's just people are
packed.
There's so many people at that time pre
COVID that they're all on top of each
other.
And the Tawaf circles, especially
around the Kaaba, the map off area, right,
like, in the front part of the sanctuary,
it's really moving slow.
And I was down there and I could
see gaps in the circles of the.
And it didn't make any sense to me.
And so when we
were walking and doing tawaf, I got closer
to the gaps
And I saw that there weren't in fact
gaps, but they were women who had come
from different countries in the world and they
didn't have the ability to walk. So they
were making Ta'af literally crawling on their knees.
And they had some of them strapped to
their backs,
their infant children as they were doing this.
Like, doing it, subhanallah,
as soon as they had the means to
do so. There's people like this
making that pilgrimage. And I'm standing up there
saying,
how is it possible that in the midst
of all of these people who are doing
such amazing things
for the sake of their creator,
that in a sea of 1,000,000, my dua
is going to be answered as well.
And it felt quite minuscule at that moment,
very insignificant.
But as instantaneously
as it hits just staring at the Kaaba
and looking out at the beauty
of so many people coming together purely for
the sake of their creator,
abandoning and leaving behind so much
a shared internal that was very empowering.
Those thoughts quickly diminished
and it wasn't about adopting a paradigm of
insignificance
because the insignificance
might have felt like I felt insignificant,
but essentially what the insignificance
was then rooted in was in a recognition
of making insignificant the one that I was
calling upon.
That if I believed that Allah couldn't
hear what I was asking of him,
I wasn't just making a claim on the
duas that I made and comparing myself to
those around me in a delusional sense of
inferiority,
but it was also giving me an indication
of who I believed the one that I
was calling upon actually was.
And did I believe in a God that
had the ability and capacity to hear all
of our prayers?
Or did I believe that God couldn't do
that?
And as instantaneous
as the doubt hit, it just dispelled.
They said, my God is Al Mujib.
He is the one that responds to all
prayers.
And just as he hears every single dua
that's being uttered from every tongue and every
heart of those that were making pilgrimage that
year and the 1,000,000
and billions around the world that are turning
to him, he also hears my dua.
He hears my prayer.
Ali
he says that
the mode, the vehicle to traverse from the
earth to the heavens is just the dua
that you're sending your supplications,
your prayers
across
the skies.
And it's not going to happen unless you
make it.
And to make it, you want to understand
who is the one that I'm praying to.
Another example that I like to utilize, I
live in New York City where there's a
lot of noise, a lot of chaos. And
I have a 6 year old son named
Kareem, and I have a 9 year old
daughter named Medina.
They're beautiful young people,
amazing blessings in my life, made to offer
them. They're some of the greatest gifts that
I've ever been given.
And I take them to New York City
parks. They're a little different from parks in
other parts of the country. New York City
parks are always packed, especially after school lets
out.
And you have
tons of kids running around making noise.
My daughter likes to be in one part
of the park. My son likes to be
in the other park. I have to be
able to pay attention to both of them.
In the sea of all of this chaos
and all of this noise,
I can guarantee that if you're a parent,
you know what I'm talking about.
That if I can hear my child cry
at any end of the park,
it separates
as a voice
from all of whatever else is moving around
us in terms of noise and chaos.
And I can identify
my baby girl, my son's voice
in the sea of all of this,
and if I can pinpoint their voices, their
cries, their screams
when there's 100, if not more,
yelling and screaming,
then how could my God not hear
my prayers and your prayers
in the sea of voices that turn to
him every day and every night?
And so Allah is the one that responds.
He is.
You want to go with certitude,
not maybe in your duas, but in the
one that you're making du'a to.
Not in a recognition
of I have confidence in my
prayers and the attentiveness in my heart, that
you have confidence
in the attentiveness of the one that you're
making dua to. That's where the surety is.
That's where the
real
reliance is.
This is the dua. Right?
Ramadan,
Ramadan in a different variation. Whoever fasts Ramadan,
whoever stands in Ramadan.
Iman
and with faith and with surety.
Means that you have expectation,
but you know, like, you have an assurity
that
God is the one that is is doing
what God says he will do.
And you don't have to doubt that ever.
And so where we can recognize now our
role,
you can make dua in any real state
that you find yourself in, but there's some
etiquettes to those Dua's.
And there's certain times, certain places,
certain states of being that dua is said
to be more readily accepted.
And you wanna think about this deeply because
in those states, there's
barakah, there's blessing,
metaphysical
increase that is determined by Allah Zogel. He
is Al Hakim.
But there's also room for more attentiveness for
us. And so I wanted to share a
few different duas or timings where we're taught
that du'a
is more readily accepted.
1,
Right? And many of us probably know this,
that may Allah make us from those who
witness and benefit from it is a time
in which we are taught that you want
to make dua.
The prophet's
wife
asks him what she should do in anticipation
of Laylatul Qadr.
He says, make the dua that we looked
at last
week. And the specificity
of the dua is important,
but also
when he is asked what do you do
in anticipation,
he's giving her a dua to make. So
you want to in these robotic nights of
Ramadan,
these last nights, don't leave it behind because
you already stood at one of the previous
nights, whether it's an even night or an
odd night or whatever night it was, but
you still use these nights and you use
these blessed nights. You even use the 1st
night of Shawwal. Right? It's the day before
Eid. It's the night before Eid. There's blessing
in that night. Don't use it as an
opportunity to stop talking to God. Use it
as an opportunity to continue talking to God.
Right? But
is a time which we're taught you wanna
make dua.
In the depths of the night, the last
parts of the night,
right, we are taught that this is a
time, the last third of the night, that
Dua is said to be
readily accepted, barakah. Right? And there's a distinction
between and
tahajjud.
Essentially, the difference is like whether you sleep
or not. If you go to sleep and
you wake up, that's the Hajjood. If you
don't sleep and you still pray in the
night, that's
If you can't wake up in the last
3rd of the night, it doesn't mean that
there's not barakah still in doing something else.
So once you've prayed your night prayers,
but if you don't think you'll wake up
before Fajr to make some extra rakas, then
just pray some extra rakas before you go
to sleep and make du'a at that time
too. Right? But we're
taught that,
Allah we're
taught that he descends
in that last 3rd of the night
to meet the needs of his servants, to
relieve their stress. And he says, who will
call upon me that I may answer him?
Who will ask of me that I may
give to him? Who will seek my forgiveness
so that I might forgive him?
A third instance where dua is said to
be readily accepted is
after you have done
your
your prescribed prayers, like, after the prayers.
And so this now gives us a unique
illustration. Right? Like,
you can only get
the outcome of the act by performing the
act itself. So if you want to make
the
dua
that is more likely to be accepted
at the conclusion of a further prayer,
then you gotta say your further prayers.
Right? So
here now,
you
have this in the hadith where the prophet
is asked, you Rasool Allah, which Dua is
heard,
and he responds in various ways in various
narrations. But in this narration, he says in
the last 3rd of the night and following
the prescribed
prayers.
And so you make du'a
at that time.
The time between the adhan and the aqamah
is
an important time. The hadith says that a
dua offered between the Adhan and the Akama
is not rejected.
And this is also the time where you
just wanna be still. You wanna be silent.
Right?
Is with the prophet
he tells him to call the Adan and
he says,
right, that, like, bring us calm, relief, ease
with it.
You know, you can't benefit
from
the listening of something without listening to it.
And to get to a place of peace
with stillness.
The Quran is being recited. The Adan is
being called.
The
imam is leading the prayer. You want to
just hear from all of your organs of
sensory perception
and to be able to partake in it
and perceive its beauty. So So you're really
listening to the words.
And it's not possible to learn if you're
not listening. And if you're talking, there's no
way that you're listening.
So
that whosoever believes in Allah in the last
day, let him speak good or be silent.
That the default state is that you just
don't wanna talk. But if you're gonna talk,
make sure you're saying something good. And between
the adhan and the akama,
that's when you want to just take in
the barakah and you wanna be making duas.
Those are the words that you want to.
Right? And you get into the habit. If
you can go to the masjid where the
adhan and the Akama is called, amazing.
But start doing it in your own homes
as well.
Whether you are praying by yourself, you have
other people praying with you. Right? You call
the Akama,
right? You are in a space where you're
bringing barakah to these things and you create
the experience of having the opportunity to make
du'a at that time.
Another time where Dua is accepted
is, when the rain falls. Right? And the
prophet
says there are 2 which will not be
rejected. Dua at the time of the Adan
and when it is raining.
Right? And Barakah in and of itself
has a
connotation of just falling.
Like, it's something that comes from above.
You know? Like, when you make dua before
you eat,
Right? It's the dua that we're told to
eat
before you eat. You know, what we're taught
is that the barakah is like literally
pouring from the dua into your food,
and it's now kind of engulfing it.
Right? And that last bit of food is
the most blessed. That's why you wanna eat
it because the barakah has been descending as
it's been coming, but barakah descends.
Rain also descends.
Right?
So the Quran, it's sent down. The malaika,
the angels, they're sent down on Laylatul Qadr.
And so the rain is a time.
When the rain is there, it's a time
that we're taught that du'a is accepted.
So you want to actively pause when the
rain is falling and make du'a.
There's a hadith that says that,
on the day of Jum'ah
that there is a time on that day
that when someone
stands and prays Allah and asks of Allah
that Allah will give it to him. And
the hadith says that
that part of the day is fairly short.
It's not a long period of the day.
Another part is when we're in sajd sajdah.
Right? The position itself
is an important time to make dua and
there's different opinions on if you're praying afar
the prayer, can you, in your sajdah,
make whatever duas that you want
or not? Right? Allah knows best, but
you can, in that place, like, look and
look at the mud hub that you follow
and ask your teachers, right, as to
according to the school of thought, what is
it that they prescribe?
Is it something that you can do in
any prayers, just in, like, the knafel prayers,
the sunnah prayers, and Allah knows best. But
the prostration is an important part
of the du'a.
The zamzam water when you drink it, the
hadith says that zamzam
water is for that which it is drunk.
So somebody brings you zamzam
from Mecca, from they go for Umrah or
Hajj. You don't just keep it in your
fridge and just let it sit there. Drink
it.
It's distinct from drinking regular water. Tzumzum
has a distinct sunnah to it that you
drink it standing and you face towards the
gaba when you're drinking it. And when you're
done drinking it, you make dua for whatever
it is you want to because that's what
the hadith says. Zamzam
is,
that zamzam is for that which it was
drunk. Right? So you're drinking zamzam, make dua
after you're done with it.
When you go through some kind of difficulty,
there's,
opportunity
to make du'a
when one is in a state of illness,
a state of travel. You know, it's a
time that you can make du'a,
the prayer of the oppressed,
the prayer of the one who is held
down,
the dua of a father for his child,
a dua of benefit, the dua of a
fasting person as they fast,
the dua of a fasting person when they
break their fast. Right?
These are duas that are
more readily accepted.
You also have the Dua that you can
actively play
for the one who has passed away from
this world.
That the hadith says that there are 3
things that a person leaves behind that will
benefit them,
when they leave from this world. One is
a siddhaka jadia, an ongoing charity.
2,
knowledge that they have imparted upon someone that
when they act upon it that,
there's benefits still derived. And 3rd is a
believing child
that prays,
a righteous child that prays for them. Right?
So you are what's left behind.
Mig Dua for the people that you know
who have passed away.
There's many other instances, but we wanted to
go through just a handful to illustrate that
there's a lot of different opportunities,
states in which du'a is said to be
more readily accepted,
so you want to take advantage of those
duas and advantage of those times, and you're
calling upon Al Mujib, the one who is
calling the one who responds to your prayers.
Right?
So you
now have, like, different etiquette
in making the dua. You could be in
a state of wudu, that's great. If you're
not in a state of wudu, you can
still make dua. You wanna try to face
the Kaaba if you can. If you can't,
you could still make dua.
Right? The formula through which we make dua,
it's recommended to first begin in the name
of Allah. So there's a hadith that says
that
every affair that does not begin in the
name of Allah, then it's cut off. And
in some narrations, the word Bismillah is replaced
with the word Alhamdulillah,
and in some narrations, the word Abtar is
replaced with the word Akhtar,
and the cutting off
from the distinction between the 2 is like
a literal cutting off. So if you can
conceptualize
that here's something that has continuity,
then one is essentially cut off from one
end, the other is cut off from the
other end. So when you start, you start
in Allah's name and you send praise to
Allah, Bismillah Wa Alhamdulillah.
The second dua then formulaically that you make
is you want to send peace and blessings
upon the prophet
Then you have sandwiched in there the dua
that you want to make. And then at
the end of it, you again send peace
and blessings upon the prophet Muhammad and
you again invoke the divine.
The idea in starting and ending with these
duas,
in Allah's name, praising Allah,
sending dourud,
is that these are duas that are accepted.
And so if you're starting and ending with
duas that are accepted,
then there's in the middle which you're sending
now more of a likelihood
that it'll be accepted as well. When you're
making du'a,
you can't make du'a for something that's haram.
That's not a du'a
that is permitted to make.
And there's so much more that is permissible
than impermissible.
So you don't want to get affixated
on just what is outside of the boundaries
of Sharia.
And if you don't know what those things
are or you're struggling with something,
you turn to somebody
who you can talk to that can help
you navigate that as to why your heart's
attached to what it is. But somebody makes
sense. Right? Empathetic listening. Allah is al Mujib.
He's hearing. He's listening. He's responding.
So you want to turn to somebody who
can help you make sense. That's not going
to listen
to be in a place where they just
put you down, but they're listening to understand.
They can help you to navigate some of
these things. Right? So of the duas that
you make, just don't make anything for anything
that's haram.
And when you're making dua,
you understand who it is that you're making
dua to. So if you're going to ask
of the divine,
then you ask in a way that recognizes
that Allah is the creator of everything. So
you're not gonna just ask for agenda, but
ask for the highest levels of agenda. Don't
ask just for dunya.
Ask for the best in the akhirah.
Why would you want something just as temporary?
Think about something that exists forever,
eternal existence.
And so I wanna come back to one
of the things that we were talking about
before
because it comes up quite often for many
that say, I'm making du'a to Allah but
I don't feel like it's being responded to.
You don't wanna conceptualize
the divine as like a birthday cake that
you're making a wish and that a wish
is being granted.
Allah is not like a magic lamp that
you're just beseeching and invoking in that way.
But as we said before, think about Allah's
al Mujib,
the one who responds
in the context of also that he is
Rahman, that he is wudud,
that he is alim, that he is al
basir.
He's all of these things and so much
more,
but Allah is also al Hakim.
And if you can recognize that he is
that we say, right, in that
he's
the most wise and that he's the most
wise of anything that has wisdom.
And so it is not in my rationale
or in my best sensibility
that I'm determining,
well, what du'a
is something
that should be best for me. But I
get to a place where I can now
start to think
constructively and critically
that Allah is Al Hakim.
So he is now in
control.
And by his wisdom, I'm turning to him
knowing that he's not gonna put into my
life something that's not going to be good
for me. And so
where and how we can reconcile this. Right?
We're taught through the hadith
that when you make dua,
your duas are either responded to,
meaning you're given what you're asked. They're deferred,
meaning you're gonna get it later
in this world or you're getting in Jannah.
And as hard as it is, right, this
world proportionally to the world that comes beyond
this,
you want to have what your heart desires
in a place that's forever. May Allah make
us all people of paradise.
But
you have that deference that's there or
that the dua is
prevented
because it's keeping something bad from happening.
So you rely on Allah's Al Hakim when
you are asking of him as Al Mujib,
that he is the most wise
the most wise of those who have wisdom.
And it is in his wisdom
that he will respond to that dua. Not
your wisdom, not my wisdom,
Not our rationale.
But in a space where we can now
feel liberated.
That I'm turning to the entity that doesn't
just watch me but watches over me. My
provider, my sustainer,
the one who put me in this world,
the one who's gonna take me out of
it. My rub, al Rahman, al Raheem, al
Wadud, al Latif,
al Halim,
all of this and more.
The other things that we want to just
think about are the states that we're making
du'a in. So if you're in a place
that's agitated,
it's gonna be hard if your heart's not
attentive to make dua.
You don't wanna be distracted. You don't wanna
get pulled away. We have the Hadith where
the prophet tells us, Right? Like, we have
the tasbih Fatima
that many of us know
where we're taught at the conclusion of a
prayer, you say
33, 33, 34 times.
And there is another hadith where the prophet,
he tells his companions, just say
10 times, Alhamdulillah
10 times, Allahu Akbar 10 times after every
Fard prayer.
And if you do that, it's gonna be
written for you 10 times over. So 30
times, 5, a 150, 10 times over,
1500
times it'll be written for you. And then
he says to them, there's gonna come a
time where people won't do it.
The companions say, why would they not do
it? It's so simple.
He said because their hearts are gonna get
pulled by something else. Something else is gonna
distract them. What you're learning right now in
Ramadan is your capacity to make dua,
that you have the ability to actually sit
after a prayer. You have the ability to
actually stand in the night, to wake up
early in the last 3rd of the night,
to make the Hajjud. You might not do
it every day. You might not need to
do it every day. You do it in
a capacity that makes sense for you that
you first recognize your capacity.
And so what's going to keep you from
sitting and simply first making the dua in
the first place? You get rid of the
distractions.
You get rid of the agitations.
You allow for yourself to be comfortable with
the stillness.
And then you turn, you Mujib, you are
the answer of all prayers.
You Kareem, you are the most generous, the
most high, the most noble,
that Allah
as
Al Kareem
does not turn us away.
So the only ingredient that's missing is that
we have to make the dua that only
we can make. And so you dig deep
and you start to use these nights for
it. And so what I would suggest just
as we've said before
is that you want to write out a
dua. Write out a du'a directed to Allah's
al Mujib.
Write it out, Yeah Mujib, and then whatever
comes.
But look now at the other names of
the divine that we have been taught.
You can do a Google search, 99 names
of Allah, Asma and Husna,
names of Allah.
You'll get lists with translations.
Can't speak Arabic, which is fine. Read the
translation.
But think about this particular name, Al Mujib,
in the context of other names that are
on those lists that you are going to
Google.
And then think about how you draw and
deepen the meaning of Al Mujib
in relation to what it is you're learning
of these other names.
And then as you continue on with it,
Imam Ghazali has a book on the 99
names of Allah, the beautiful names of Allah
that's in English you can get. There's a
lot of books that are there that are
amazing.
You just spend time in the same manner
that we've been doing these last few weeks.
Write out the du'a,
utilizing the divine name you're studying.
Think about how you see examples
of
that
divine
characteristic
embodied in the world around you, mercy, compassion,
love.
And then think about how you can actualize
it if there's capacity to do so. So
we can't
actualize being Al Khaliq.
Allah alone is Alkhalic.
Right?
But fundamentally,
there's other divine names that we can think.
Well, how do I live mercy? How do
I live compassion?
How do I live
wisdom? How do I live gentleness?
And so much more.
If I can be helpful to any of
you as things go on, please let me
know. I'm gonna put my email address here
in the chat box again. And I know
some of you have already reached out and
have read the messages you sent to me.
I,
am happy to set up times to talk
with you if that's helpful as well.
But if this is the last time that
we're meant to spend time together,
at least in this worldly plane, then I
make dua that Allah
gathers us all together again in the best
of places in the world beyond this one.
And please utilize these last nights of Ramadan
to the best of your ability.
Engage in conversation with the divine. Make du'a
to Allah.
Pray.
Read the Quran.
Engage in acts of charity.
Do whatever it is that you can do,
take advantage of every moment.
Inshallah,
Allah
will accept from all of us
and for the duas that we make that
he will respond to them. You Mujeeb, respond
to our duas. You Kareem, respond to our
duas
and give to us even better than what
it is that we are asking of you.