Mirza Yawar Baig – Goals of learning #2
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The importance of reading Seems blessed in order to practice learning about life is emphasized, along with the importance of practicing the lessons in a small way. The Seems of Islam is a foundation and pillar of their business, and the love for Muhammad S.A.W. is a part of their faith. measuring time by metrics and learning from the sun is also discussed, along with the importance of emulation in measuring love for one another. Emulation is used to indicate love for one another, and practicing it can improve one's life.
AI: Summary ©
The Seerah, therefore, is a required reading.
It is a part of the education of
the Muslim.
Unfortunately, it is highly neglected, and that is
something that we need to change.
So next question, next benchmark for yourself is,
what do I know about the Seerah?
I will also post some links to books
of the Seerah that you can start with,
Inshallah.
So read those books, Inshallah, it will give
you an idea about the life of Rasulullah
ﷺ.
Now, when you're reading the book, key thing
to understand is you are not reading it
for information.
You're not reading it to get some names
or mention or remember some dates.
You are reading it only with one purpose,
and that is to say, how can I
practice this in my life?
Inshallah, Allah ﷻ will put barakah in our
lives if we do that, and therefore we
must read and study.
When I say read, that's only the first
part, just reading.
But the key thing is not just to
read, but to study it in detail, and
then to implement it in our lives.
So this is a very important thing to
do.
Second thing is, also take this into the
family.
Get the children, get your spouses, everyone involved
in that, and practice it in the smallest
ways.
You sit down to eat, you say, are
we eating in the way that Rasulullah ﷺ
used to eat?
And then have a little like a quiz.
You say, well, how did he eat?
So he ate with his right hand.
He said, Bismillah, before he ate.
And he did this, and he did that,
and he did that.
Whatever he used to do, we do that.
And make sure that we remember those things
and we practice it.
So what is the learning from the Seeratun
Nabi ﷺ?
Now, in the course of this same discussion
and thinking about the Seerah, which will come
automatically, it will happen if you are studying
the Seerah, this is something which is bound
to happen, which is, talk about the Akhirah.
Because this is a reality which nobody denies.
People deny even Allah ﷻ, they deny the
Nabi ﷺ.
They deny everything, but nobody denies death, because
we know one day we will die.
We have seen others dying.
We have seen others dead.
We have attended Janazahs.
We have gone to the Qutub-e-Mawwarah,
to the Khabar Ashtan, and we have buried
people, and so on.
So we know this.
So what is our preparation for that?
So have these discussions.
Talk about it.
The reason I'm saying this is because the
reality is that in life, you will find
whatever you talk about remains.
What you don't talk about disappears.
Just a very simple test.
If I ask you, tell me the name
of your maternal great-grandmother, that is, your
mother's grandmother, right?
Your mother's grandmother.
I can bet you that most of you
will not even know the name, because the
name is never spoken, right?
At the most somebody will say Nanija, Nanima,
some such thing, you know, Jada, but nobody,
usually the name is not there.
So it disappears.
It is as if she never existed.
She existed, that is why you exist.
You have got her genes in your blood,
you have got her blood in your veins,
but you do not even know the name.
So that is a very important thing.
So therefore, as far as the consciousness of
the Akhira is concerned, the same rule applies.
If you mention it, if you talk about
it, the consciousness will remain, and the consciousness
is only the first step.
It is not simply enough to say I
am conscious, I am conscious means what?
So therefore I need to run my life
in a way where on the Day of
Judgment I will not be humiliated before Allah
SWT.
The Sahaba used to discuss, they used to
talk to the Prophet, many many hadiths where
they asked the Prophet, Ya Rasulullah, how is
Jannah?
What is the water like?
What is the size of the pomegranate fruit?
What is the size of the grape?
What is this?
What is that?
I mean they used to ask many many
questions.
Nabi S.A.W. said there will be
people in Jannah who will have palaces which
are floating in the air.
Imagine, you are sitting on the ground, the
palace is up high up in the air.
Huge beautiful palace, as Sahaba said.
And see the questions also that they asked.
They show the level of Iman and Yaqeen.
When Nabi S.A.W. said that there
will be palaces, people will have palaces which
are floating in the air, they did not
ask how is it possible, how can something
float in the air?
Today if I throw a stone up, it
comes down, there is gravity, is there no
gravity in Jannah?
They didn't ask all this.
They said, Ya Rasulullah, how will we get
into that palace?
So he said you will fly up like
a bird.
Imagine, so the fact that there will be
a palace floating in the air is a
matter of Yaqeen for them and should be
for us only because Rasulullah S.A.W.
said so.
Now all of this will happen if we
study the Seerah, if we understand the Seerah
because the love for Rasulullah S.A.W.
is an article of faith.
It is something which is a foundation, which
is a pillar of our Iman.
The love for Muhammad S.A.W. is
not a discretionary thing, it is not something,
if it is good to have, if you
don't have it is okay.
You know I love him more, somebody loves
him less.
No, to love the Rasulullah S.A.W.
is a part of faith.
If a Muslim says I do not love
Muhammad S.A.W., he ceases to be
a Muslim.
If a Muslim has a doubt about love
for Muhammad S.A.W., this man's Iman
is in serious doubt.
His Iman is in great danger.
Now that is the reason we need to
study the Seerah because obviously, logically speaking, you
cannot love somebody you don't know.
You can only love someone you know.
And the beauty of the life of Rasulullah
S.A.W., and this is true also
of the Sahaba, is that unlike normal people
today, there is a proverb in English, familiarity
breeds contempt, which means that the closer you
know somebody, the more you know somebody, the
more you are familiar with somebody, you will
lose respect for them.
Because, may Allah protect us, our lives are
like that.
If somebody comes to know the details of
your life, then it is likely that they
will uncover all kinds of not very nice
details and they lose respect for you.
So it is better to be at an
arm's distance.
But not in the case of Nabi S
.A.W. With Rasulullah S.A.W., the
more you learn about him, the more you
love him.
The more you know about him, the more
you love him.
And this is one of the evidences and
proofs of his Risalah also, that Allah S
.W.T. created him in such a way
and gave him such Akhlaq, which Allah S
.W.T. himself praised.
And Allah S.W.T. said, you are
on the best of Akhlaq.
So therefore, reading and studying the Sunnah of
Rasulullah S.A.W. with the intention of
practicing it, and then actually practicing it in
your life.
And the important thing there is to monitor
that.
As I said, two things.
One is things that you don't mention, you
forget.
You don't know.
You lose consciousness of that.
Second thing is that what we monitor, what
we measure, is what we value.
There's a guy called Michael Harry who invented
the Six Sigma quality standard.
He used to work in Motorola.
He said, a famous quote, he said, if
you want to see what people value, see
what they measure.
If you want to see what people value,
see what they measure.
So we like to say time is money.
But time is not money because if we
really value time like we value money, just
to give you a short example, if you
drop a hundred dollar bill and you lose
it, then you will feel the pain of
that.
Although a hundred dollars is not such a
great amount of money, it's okay, you lost
it, lost it.
But no, you will feel that pain because
you have a value for that hundred dollars.
You might feel the same pain for twenty
dollars.
But how much time do we spend on
useless social media?
How much time do we spend on just
browsing the net or watching TikTok or watching
YouTube shorts or something?
At the end of that one hour, two
hours, time just flies.
And at the end of that two hours
or one hour, if somebody says, please write
down three things that you learned from this
one hour of your lifespan that you donated
to TikTok free of cost so that TikTok
can make money, what did you gain from
these three things that you can count?
I can bet you there is not one
person who will be able to write these
things because it's just mindless looking at the
screen.
And that's very, very important for us to
keep this in mind and say, what do
you value?
And the way you value is by metrics,
by measurements.
So when you say I value the sunnah,
the thing to do is now measure how
much of the sunnah am I practicing in
my life.
Right?
It's not enough simply to say, you know,
the people who claim to love Rasulullah s
.a.w. and their love of the Nabi
s.a.w. is on one day in
the year, they will sing nasheed and whatnot
and they will have a function and they
will call it miladunabi or what.
I'm not even going into the, you know,
aspect of whether to celebrate milad, maulud, whatnot
on the 12th of Rabiul Awal, whether this
is sunnah or widah.
Forget that.
Point is, if you value the Nabi s
.a.w., if you love the Rasul s
.a.w., what is the evidence?
And the evidence can be only one, which
is I emulate him, I follow him.
The love for the Rasul is shown by
following his way.
So we need to measure that and say,
well, how many sunnah do I follow in
my life?
And is that increasing?
Like I said to you about the Qur
'an, how much Qur'an did I know
last year?
How much do I know this year?
Is there a difference?
If I don't know more this year than
last year, then something is wrong.
I need to memorize some more.
Until I finish, inshallah, the complete Qur'an
al-Karim, I become Hafiz al-Qur'an.
No matter how long it takes, inshallah, we
have the hope with Allah that Allah s
.w.t. will grant us the level of
a Hafiz.
Even if we did not make it, if
we died before that, because we had the
niyyah and we made the effort.
Similarly with the sunnah, I make this into
a niyyah to say, I want to be
as close to the Nabi s.a.w.
as possible.
So how many sunnah of his sunnah do
I follow?
So in my appearance, in my speaking, in
my dealings, in my earnings, in what I
eat and how I eat, how I sleep,
how do I deal with my family, how
do I deal with my children, my neighbors,
my employer, my employees, the whole thing, the
beauty of the life of Rasul s.a
.w. is that there is an answer for
every person, no matter what that person's own
situation is in life.
If a king wants to know how must
I rule, there is an answer in the
life of the Nabi s.a.w. If
a beggar wants to know what must I
do, I'm in a destitute condition, I want
no money, there is an answer in the
life of the Rasul s.a.w. If
an employer, if an employee, if a soldier,
if a general, if a married person, if
an unmarried person, if a man or a
woman, a child, whoever has any issue, any
question in his life and say, how must
I do this in a way that will
please my Rabbi s.a.w., the answer
is in the life of Rasul s.a
.w. And that is the reason why it
is so important to study his life in
such detail.
So Inshallah this is your second metric.
First metric is the Quran, the second metric
is the Seerah of Nabi s.a.w.
with the intention of practicing it in our
lives.
I want to close with the Basharah and
the promise that Allah s.w.t. gave
to the one who emulates, the one who
emulates, not only obeys, who emulates the Nabi
s.a.w. Allah s.w.t. said,
Allah s.w.t. said, Say to those
who claim to love Allah s.w.t.,
say to those who say we love Allah,
emulate me, emulate Muhammad s.a.w. Emulate,
not only obey, emulate.
Emulation is a sign of love.
Obedience requires an instruction.
You cannot obey unless there is an order.
But emulation requires no instruction.
Emulation happens because we love.
So people will imitate film actors, they will
imitate sportsmen and sportswomen and they will dress
like this fashion icon and that fashion icon,
not because that person told them to do
that, but just because they love that person
and they want to be like that person,
therefore they emulate that person.
And if we emulate Muhammad s.a.w.,
what will happen?
Allah s.w.t. said, I want, I
remind myself and you, let us sit with
this statement.
Allah will love you.
Who is saying this?
Allah is saying it.
Allah s.w.t. is saying, I will
love you.
What is the meaning of this?
What is the value of this?
What does it mean to say that Allah
loves me?
Just think about it in one simple context,
which is that if in fact Allah s
.w.t. loves me, then if I raise
my hands to ask Allah for something, what
is the absolutely unwavering, faultless result?
That is that whatever I ask Allah will
give me.
Because what is the meaning of love?
If Allah is loving me and then if
I ask him for something he doesn't give
me, then where is the love?
So Allah will give.
This is the beauty.
So think about this and say, Allah said,
And the minimum condition of that is, Allah
will forgive your sins and Allah is the
most forgiving and most merciful.
So the boundary condition, the first step of
Allah loving me is that Allah will forgive
my sins.
This is the beauty of the Sunnah of
Rasulullah s.a.w. I ask Allah s
.w.t. to enable us to live our
lives in a way which is pleasing to
him and his glory and majesty and to
live our lives in a way which emulates
the way and method of Rasulullah s.a
.w.