Mohammad Elshinawy – S2#04 Can Imams be Toxic- Behind the Minbar Podcast
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As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh, bismillah
alhamdulillah, wassalatu wassalamu ala rasulillah, welcoming everybody back
to Behind the Minbar, Blueprints for a Better
Masjid, Istanbul edition.
I think this is my third successful gig
in Istanbul, hounding till I bring in a
few of the experts passing through the transit
of the great city.
Alhamdulillah, we're honored today to have my good
brother, my big brother, Dr. Osman Omar.
We are, inshallah, going to have to do
it right and act like he's not a
dear friend and give him his formal bio
and then we're, inshallah, going to jump into
the topic of potent preaching and poisonous preaching
and how to connect people to Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala through the masjid, best practices,
worst practices.
Dr. Osman Omar is one of the research
directors at Yakhin Institute in the psycho-spirituality
department and data collection analytics department, also an
accomplished psychologist at UC Irvine, University of California
Irvine.
Dr. Osman, I appreciate your time and I
have been following from a distance, huge fan
of your work on rehabilitating people's God images.
However, considering this is going to be specifically
for masjid, we need to first and foremost
set the stage, what is a God image?
I'll be honest with you, I actually, the
first time I heard it, it immediately gave
me Christian vibes.
Like, is that even an Islamic thing?
Like, what's a God image?
Is this related to we were all created
in God's image?
That's actually the first thought that came to
mind.
I never shared that with you before.
So, entry level, what is a God image?
Is there a precedent for this in the
Islamic text, the revelation?
Bismillah, floor is yours.
If you read the paper, the first paragraph,
we make sure to make it very clear,
it's not about a Christian-y image of
God.
So, go back and you can see that.
The paper is called?
The paper, oh gosh, the name is called,
they've changed it now.
It was the Alchemy of Divine Love, but
now it's called like Spiritual Attachment Styles or
something.
I'll link it in the description of the
video, Inshallah.
Bismillah, please frame it for us.
Yes, so this idea of a God image,
just a very simple definition.
It is a perception that every human being
has in their mind as to who is
Allah Azzawajal.
And the term image is not from thinking
of a picture of an image, but more
from imagination.
So, how do you imagine Allah Azzawajal to
be?
And we use this term.
First, it's a term that's known in the
literature, more academic psychological literature, to be honest,
that, of course, Christians have contributed to.
But it comes from this notion that we
cannot see Allah Azzawajal's benevolence.
We don't see his beauty.
We don't see any of the things we're
taught about Allah Azzawajal.
Our eyes are not the immediate translators of
those beautiful names and attributes.
So, somehow, some way, you know, through our
life experiences, we translate all this information in
our life, and we concoct some sort of
perception of who he is.
That's what we mean by an image of
God.
You don't mean sort of like vectors and
imagining in a way that a fantasy of
a child would or something like that?
No, no, no, absolutely not.
No, no, of course not.
There's nothing anthropomorphic about this at all.
Okay, awesome.
Exonerated is Allah, right?
Above even what our imaginations can conjure up.
And so, what is the difference between that
and me sort of deepening my study of
theology, right?
Sort of increasing my information about Allah Azzawajal.
How does that differ?
Yeah, so that's actually what the whole topic
is about.
And we start with this notion that your
perception of Allah Azzawajal, your image of Allah
Azzawajal, we argue, is formed from two different
places.
And you find a lot of evidence from
Nisr ibn Qayyim and many other traditional scholars
that there's an element of your knowledge of
Allah comes from something intellectual, something formal, right?
Call it cognitive, right?
You form beliefs about Allah Azzawajal through things
you're explicitly taught.
So you read the Qur'an and you
get his names, you know, in different places
in the Qur'an.
You read the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and you get different attributes
of Allah Azzawajal.
And then you get it when you sit
down in a classroom, you get it through
a textbook, right?
You get it if you're studying Kalam, right?
Or you're studying any other formal traditional method
of Islamic studies, you're going to realize that
there are certain cognitive beliefs you're supposed to
have about Allah Azzawajal.
But the problem is people stop there and
they think that that is how you learn
about who Allah Azzawajal is.
Just sort of the doctrinal...
Exactly, the academic level, right?
The theoretical level of saying, well, and you
can do this, you ask any kid who
is Allah Azzawajal, they'll tell you, he is
the creator and he's powerful, right?
And he's strong and he's mighty and he
can start to list as many names as
they know.
And they can give you maybe if you're
more advanced, some of the proofs of his
existence, so on and so forth.
But this has nothing to do with what
we are here to speak about today or
what we want to conceptualize as one's image
of Allah Azzawajal or your perception.
When we speak about a perception, we're talking
about how do you experience Allah Azzawajal in
your life.
So the second side of this, of where
your God image comes from, we call affective,
you know, relational component, right?
Or experiential component, which is that every human
being somehow has to come to terms with,
do they feel Allah in their life?
So to give you a very clear example,
Allah Azzawajal says he is qarib in the
Quran, he's near, right?
He is near, closer to us than, you
know, our jugular vein as the Quran says.
That is something in my mind, Allah is
near.
Do I feel his nearness?
It's something completely different.
So I could believe Allah is near, but
I may not feel his nearness.
Or I could believe that Allah Azzawajal is
ar-Rahman, he is full of mercy.
I don't feel his mercy in my life.
And of course, you can extend that to
all of his different names and attributes.
So a lot of our research is about
understanding how do these...
Attaching ourselves to the reality of these names
is sort of the right way to think
about this?
Of course, attaching ourselves to Allah Azzawajal through
experiencing his benevolence in the way that he
meant for you to experience.
So you'll only want to attach yourself to
him if you experience him on a level
that is sort of impactful or appealing to
you.
Yeah, that's the human nature, right?
The human nature is that we want to
be near to, even in the human sense,
people who we feel an emotional attachment towards,
right?
If you have love for someone, right?
If you feel some other sort of...
What's the right word to use here?
You feel a propensity to get near that
person because you're seeing their attributes before you.
I'll give you just a good example, right?
If someone...
Imagine a husband, right?
It's easy.
We're both married and we talk about this
a lot.
You could tell your wife, I love you,
I love you, I love you all the
time, right?
And you could say that I care for
you so much and all these other nice
terms to show your love for your spouse.
But then you say that with your words,
but then your behavior, you're constantly, you're yelling
at her, right?
Or you are arguing with her or some
other form of...
She's experiencing the opposite of what you're saying.
You say, I love you, but she's saying,
I don't feel your love.
So this is the disconnect we're speaking about
here.
And this is where we want to get
it so that your spouse's perception of you
is not necessarily your own words of who
you are.
And so Allah, of course, tells us who
he is in the Quran and the Prophet
tells us who he is in the Hadith,
but then people experience it very differently for
many different reasons that are experiential for the
most part.
So I think this is really useful to
bring us into the next phase of this,
which is how different have you found it
in your studies, in your research?
People's sort of theoretical knowledge of Allah and
how imbalanced or potentially dangerous, pathological their experience
with Allah may be.
Yeah.
So what we find is that most Muslims
can answer all the right questions on the
academic side, the theoretical side.
So if you ask someone like, is Allah
merciful?
Everyone's going to tell you, he's very, very,
very merciful because it's just an intellectual belief.
But then when you ask them, do you
experience his mercy or his forgiveness or his
help and his support and his aid, then
you find there's a number of people I'd
say, at least in our populations, no less
than 15%, probably it's close.
And this is underreported because we have more
religious samples.
A non-trivial percentage of the population, I
would say, has a number of distortions.
And this idea of distortion is a very
Quranic idea.
Allah says in the Quran three different times,
that humanity and people, they have not estimated
Allah in his proper estimation.
So Allah was well aware that as perfect
as he is, the ability for the human
being to perceive that perfection is, I mean,
other than the Anbiya, no one is going
to have that level of Iman and connection
with Allah.
So we need to all be aware that
we probably have some level of distortion in
our understanding and our image of Allah.
And then of course, depending on those who
are below us, our children, our community members,
so on and so forth, it could be
worse and worse and worse, because this is
an issue that as I want to kind
of open up to, culture shapes us quite
a bit.
So I don't know if we want to
open that, but it's not simply what my
mom tells me, my dad tells me in
the Quran, the Sunnah tells me, but it's
what movies tell you.
And it's what TV shows tell you, and
what my classmates tell me, and my co
-workers tell me.
Exactly, right, exactly.
Marvel, what the Marvel Universe tells you, which
is in every movie you see, that there's
a villain, and it's some all-powerful God,
and he's usually very mean, and he's out
to get humanity.
And so you might think, well, what's the
big deal?
I'm watching this movie, but it is slowly,
slowly, like you're a stone that's being, with
the waves over it, it's changing who you
are, changing your perception of Allah.
And it's always the hero, the one that's
able to vanquish the God, or half-God,
or demi-God, who's inherently evil.
You know, one of the maybe concluding remarks
that I want to share, make sure we
don't miss it as we move into the
masjid atmosphere, because the masjid, we often say,
is the counterculture, right?
The culture and society shapes you, and so
how does a masjid help at rehabilitating?
But just to encourage people to go back
to the paper and not miss out on
it, it was wonderful that you guys identified,
you, Dr. Hassan Alwan, and whoever else is
working on the research, that the Prophet ﷺ
came to a society that had like mutated,
regressive, you know, crude God images, and even
in old age, they were, or even in
adulthood, lesser, so in old age, but in
general, people can be rehabilitated even beyond their
childhood years, their most formative years.
And so that just shows you the power
of understanding the names and attributes of on
experiential level.
I remember actually, Dr. Omar Suleiman Al-Ashqar,
the great scholar, he would regularly lament to
this point that since the Islamic revival began,
the Sahwa, you know, in recent decades, much
of the discussion on Allah's names and attributes
has been clearly formulated for the purpose of
sectarian membership.
Like, do you make the cut or not
make the cut?
He said people have failed to realize that
the majority of their discussion on so-called
Aqidah, creed, or theology is actually just the
guardrails of Aqidah, what keeps you in and
out of the deviant circle.
Whereas you never get to the part that
actually invigorates your soul, that actually sort of
transforms your life.
And so once you actually get to that,
the reality of the names and attributes of
Allah, it is transformative, rehabilitative, even in older
ages.
But now society plays a huge role.
And you even mentioned in the paper, SubhanAllah,
one thing is reminding me of another that
the most contributing factor to healthy transmission of
faith across generations is the parents, the immediate
family.
We, for the sake of this podcast, are
focusing so much on the Masjid being serving
the function of the extended family that has
gone extinct for the most part in modern
life.
So how can the Masjid, in its capacity
as the extended family, help also rehabilitate people's
God image, since the Masjid does represent Allah
and Allah's deen in a sense?
Yeah, I mean, this would be, if we
have to come up with like a slogan,
like this is the role of the Masjid,
is to rehabilitate the understanding of who Allah
is in the hearts and the minds of
its population.
That includes the parents, it includes the children,
and includes everybody else, right?
So that needs to be the mission statement.
So when you think about the Khutbahs, you
think about the youth program, you think about
any other activity the Masjid is doing, that
needs to be in the back of their
mind, is that how is this programming facilitating
an experience with Allah Azza wa Jal, an
affective memory, if I use that term, which
essentially is giving this idea, a long term,
you're going to remember these things.
If you come up with a crude example,
right?
If you're in the Masjid as a kid,
and when you're reading the Quran, and you
get slapped when you mispronounce it, that could
set something 20 years later, where you say,
you know what, I don't like the Quran,
or I have an aversive experience with the
Quran, because I remember getting slapped 20 years
ago.
It's the one time.
You remember how you felt, even if you
don't remember the experience.
That's what I mean by an affective memory,
exactly.
So people will forget most of the words,
they'll forget most of the, yeah, exactly.
But they'll remember the experience.
Did I enjoy that experience?
I was in the Khutbah, I forgot what
he said, but I remember it was a
good experience.
So really, I think the Masjid needs to
have this front and center.
So educating the parents, tolerating sort of the
indiscretions even of the youth or whoever, the
newcomer.
Yeah, the entire atmosphere on this, right?
You know, when I was the imam, he
used to really just tear at me.
We have a new convert comes in, very
common, right?
Of course, in America, it's very common to
have tattoos.
And the convert comes to take a shahadah,
and he's got tattoos on.
Someone's got to say something.
And he has to get three, four guys
on the way from the back of the
Masjid to the front.
Brother, that's forbidden, right?
You got to remove those tattoos.
I'm just like, okay, what kind of culture
are you creating here, right?
And of course, you can extend it to
the children.
Children coming to the Masjid, making a little
bit of noise, doing something that's not optimal,
and being dealt with very harshly.
Those memories will last, right?
What did I think of the Masjid when
I'm older?
I remember getting scolded all the time.
And that's what we don't want to put
in the hearts of our kids.
SubhanAllah, it is so interesting how, of course,
we got to state this carefully.
I mean, believing in the unseen and not
sort of humanizing God is front and center
in our beliefs as Muslims.
But whether we like it or not, we
draw parallels between people and Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala, and our interactions with people that
are supposedly associated with Allah, or we perceive
them as associated with Allah.
On the converse, even, I remember your co
-author, Dr. Hassan Alwan, he said something that
was just a genuinely enlightening moment, as they
say.
He said, think about this, Allah wanted you
to know who he was, so he sent
Muhammad.
And, you know, there's such a, there's an
immeasurable distinction between creator and creation.
But it's almost like there's a an earthly
pivot in some of the creation for how
we perceive Allah.
So we got to be very conscious of
this, like programming even for parents, and creating
a culture of, you know, zero tolerance, when
it comes to like, just reacting in ways
that chase people away.
Bashiru wa latunafiru, right?
I have a friend who tried to translate
it in rhyme.
It says, Bashiru wa latunafiru, which basically means
give glad tidings and like, don't make people
averse.
And he said, spread cheer, not fear.
I like it.
He said, because the Prophet intended to make
it rhyme, so it sticks in everybody's mind.
He wanted to etch it in your personality.
That's beautiful.
Yeah, spread cheer, not fear.
Being a cheerful place, being a happy place,
in general, not an institution of do's and
don'ts.
That is sort of the masjid atmosphere.
Let's get, let's dig our heels in a
little bit with the preaching itself, right?
But can we take that for a minute?
Of course.
Because I think sometimes we assume that the
education that's happening, or the tarbiyah that's happening,
is only in these formal like settings, like
you know, the class, the halaqah.
But like you mentioned, it's that cheerful environment
that sometimes is very, let's write word to
use, it's baked into everything, even the random
interactions.
So when I think about that interaction, when
the Prophet is sitting in the masjid, and
with the sahaba, and the man comes to
him, he says like, Ya Rasulullah, I'm ruined.
It's like, he's coming just kind of ask
the Prophet a question, peace be upon him,
and the Prophet says, what's going on?
You know, he had a relation with his
wife during Ramadan, and the Prophet, peace be
upon him, you know, tells him, you know,
well, you know, can you do this, and
can you do this?
And so, you know, he's like, I couldn't
fast for like one day, and you want
me to fast for like two consecutive months,
and you know, and so the Prophet, peace
be upon him, just in there, he's kind
of like, okay, you know, like, let me,
let me think about this a bit, right?
And then someone comes and brings a basket
of dates, right?
And then he says, where's that guy who
has a question?
And he says, here, take this basket of
dates, and go and give it to the
poor people, right?
Let it be the expiation for you.
He's like, Ya Rasulullah, there's no one who's
poorer than me in this entire community.
And the hadith is fascinating, because it didn't
say, it actually tells you the Prophet's emotional
response, right?
It says that he smiled, right?
Right?
Yeah, wide smile, and then he gave him
the basket, right?
And said, give this to you and your
family, right?
What I find fascinating about this hadith is
that it's a situation that many people, if
you think about it, like, just remove the
seerah, and just say this happened in your
community, you would probably analyze this as this
guy didn't want to be guided.
He comes, and he's at, he says he
messed up, and the Prophet told him what
to do.
And he said, I can't do it.
He told him something else to do.
He said, I can't do it.
Then he gave him, like, the answer.
The guy still said, he gave him the
answer.
He's like, no, I can't do that answer,
right?
But the Prophet said, this, this culture he
created, and you can see how the sahabah
are watching this, and how that's going to
permeate now, like, when they have interactions of
Bukhari Sadiq and anybody else.
So, that's what I mean.
So, it's not just in a formal setting.
And those hadith, like, you know, are very,
very famous, where, you know, the Prophet asked
them to smile with his molars, so you
could see his molars, right?
To really accentuate this idea that the emotions
matter, right?
In every circumstance, they matter, right?
So, now we can get to the formal
stuff.
The smile, the touch, all these things.
This is all over the sunnah, right?
It's the, it's the, it's the non-spoken
aspect of transmitting benevolence, and love, and care,
and concern.
And we know now, sort of, the, the,
the chemical benefit of, like, welcome touch.
Yep.
Right?
I'm not going to speak about oxytocin in
your presence, so I'll just pivot over to
another O, which is the oration part, right?
The preaching.
So, how does preaching play into this?
What are, like, some of the best, or
maybe just start with the worst, and then
we'll be solution-oriented as we wind down,
inshallah.
How do, how do we distort people's God
image unintentionally?
Yeah.
So, preaching.
Let's start from the very top.
Again, if the role of the Prophet, and
all the Anbiya, is to correct people's deviations
and distortions from understanding Allah Azza wa Jal,
first and foremost, they're going to start with
this, right?
You said, in the formal addresses that they
give people.
So, the khutbah is a place where we
need to ensure that people are being reinforced
about the benevolence of Allah Azza wa Jal,
and experiencing His beauty through also the behavior
of the khateeb.
This is also what we want to get
into.
Right?
Body language before spoken language.
Exactly, right?
Body language before spoken language.
Like you said, even a touch, even something
as simple as, as you're going to Jummah,
giving the salams and smiling to kids and
other adults as you're walking up, that gentleness
and that kindness.
But what often happens is, you want to
focus on the bad part for a moment,
right?
Is that the khateeb will often get up,
and with the utmost concern for the well
-being of people, he sees, especially in the
West, where, you know, at times people are
not reminded of Allah as often as they
should be.
And he feels like, it's my moment, I
got 15, 20 minutes to really let them
know, stop screwing up.
Yes, create urgency, right?
Don't mess up your life.
So, out of the love that they have
for the people not to go to *,
they'll tell them things like, you know what,
if you do this sin, then Allah gets
very upset, right?
If you do this, then Allah gets angry.
And if, you know, Allah distorted people, right?
Who did this?
The problem is that when that messaging becomes
the norm, because again, you're getting 15 to
20 minutes in a week for most people.
If you take out the introduction, and you
take out the dua, right, sometimes it's 10
minutes, right?
So in 10 minutes, the only touch point
you have with the deen of Allah Azza
wa Jal, and you're hearing about Allah Azza
wa Jal's anger, or about what upsets him,
or about his punishment.
Week by week by week, they can slowly
distort the image that we're speaking about.
Now, of course, it's true that Allah does
get angry at things.
But again, we're talking about dosage, we're talking
about your role as the leader of the
community in shaping these type of things.
So the poisonous part here is the over
-reliance on fear, the over-reliance on punishment
as a deterrent.
And this is human nature, because people believe,
and I've had people say this to me,
they said fear is a better motivator, right,
than hope.
But actually, this is not true.
Actually, even, you know, tons of psychological literature
does not support this notion, although it's just
maybe a heuristic people have absorbed, that if
I tell people, hey, there's a punishment for
doing this, they'll abstain from it.
This is true in the moment only.
So if I want my kid to not
do something right now, yelling and screaming is
the best way for him not to do
it.
But if I want my kid not to
do it over the next 10, 20, 30,
40 years, that is not the technique to
use.
That is what requires patience.
That's what requires benevolence.
That's what requires sabr, because guess what, he's
not going to do it the first time
you do it, the smile on your face,
or the second time, or the third time.
But this is, this is what tarbiyah is
about.
This is what big picture thinking is.
So the khateeb is thinking, man, people are
in sin.
My khutbah today, my goal is not to
get them out of sin today, and it's
over.
It's over the next 5, 10, 20 years
do they head in the direction towards Allah
Azza wa Jal, and I have to be
sabr to do this.
You know, there are two passages in the
Quran that need reconciling.
If someone has noticed the apparent sort of
conflict, what seems to be a conflict.
One says that, in the remembrance of Allah,
the hearts find comfort and reassurance.
But the other verse says, in the remembrance
of Allah, their hearts find fear, or their
hearts tremble.
And I just, thinking about it, hearing you
say, it'll work immediately, it's a quick fix,
but it will not give you a sustained
virtue.
I used one way, man.
So the remembrance of Allah creates reassurance, or
does it cause the heart to tremble?
And actually the answer is in the verse.
The second verse says, and wajila means to
like, it's like the shock factor.
It's almost like the onset of religiosity could
come from fear.
At the moment, it's healthy, but as you
put it beautifully, it's the dosage.
If you think you can live on medicine,
and you can't actually get to the food,
can't get to sort of healthy living and
holistic living, it's not going to work.
So the verse says wajila, means like a
quick quiver.
Then it says, and then their hearts and
their skins soften and relax from the remembrance
of Allah.
And so, front and center, especially for the
believer.
I remember our brother Omar Osman from Qalam
Institute in Dallas, he has a traveling short
seminar for khutbah workshop.
I've attended myself and benefited greatly.
One of the anecdotes he picks is that
there was one of these tirades in khutbah.
It was like one of these hellfire speeches,
right?
And he's just as I was about to
walk out, I could not believe he was
this tone deaf.
There's stereotypes and he was fitting it and
blowing it out the park.
He says, then he sat down in the
break, then he stood up again and took
a deep breath.
I have no idea who he is, by
the way.
I don't know who he is, but it
gives me the liberty to speak a little
bit freely here.
Then he said, brothers and sisters, the hellfire
has seven gates, whereas it is true that
paradise has eight gates.
But let me tell you something, clubbing isn't
one of them.
And he circles right back into the black
hole of blasting the crowd.
And our brother Omar Osman, his reflection was
like, guys, you have to think if someone
is in the masjid, he's probably not clubbing.
And if he's in the masjid, he's probably
feeling at least guilty already about the clubbing.
So the wajidat already happened, like sort of
the tremble, the quiver.
And I don't remember, it was just before
or just after I attended this workshop that
a brother attended my khutbah that I hadn't
seen in about 10 years since college.
And he basically, alhamdulillah, he thanked me after
the khutbah.
And as he approached me, I think I
could tell he was not in a good
place.
He was hungover from partying the night prior.
And he said, you know, I was looking
for redemption.
And I just said, let me try.
You know, I haven't prayed forever.
And I just came.
Imagine I would have sort of severed him
from the mercy of Allah.
So whoever's in the masjid probably already has
the dose of fear.
The onset is already there.
And so I always try to think of
it like the fear is the medicine and
the hope is the food for the most
part, right?
Yeah, no, I think you've hit the nail
on the head here.
You be cognizant.
We're not trying to promote.
And people get, this is where I think
they get tripped up.
Yes, exactly.
Are you trying to say that we should
just preach that Allah is all love, right?
God is love, right?
You know, and that, you know, you're all
good to go and just, you know, do
what you want to do.
Allah will forgive you.
No one's saying this.
Istidraj is a serious thing that we should
be giving, speaking about in a khutbah that,
you know, this, this feeling that I'm, I'm
safe from God's punishment.
But again, we go back to the Quran.
And this is what I like to remind
myself, even when I'm, when I'm, when I'm
doing my research and I'm speaking about Allah
azza wa jal, is that we get stories
in the Quran about Allah destroying societies and
civilizations.
But I think people make a, they make
a false qiyas here.
They say because Allah azza wa jal destroyed
a people who, for instance, you know, let's
just say, come up with a good example,
right?
You know, unethical business practices as an example,
right?
That any individual who does an act of
unethical business is going to hellfire as well.
These are collective rebellions.
So we do this, you know, uh, you
know, taqsis al-aam, right?
And ta'mim al-khasl as a, you know,
not just in fifth, right?
Exactly.
We do it in all these things, right?
You know, we take the specific and we
make it general and make the general and
make it very specific.
This is a huge mistake, right?
In, in, you know, in, in, in preaching
that we do.
So coming back to this point.
So what is the dosage?
When Allah azza wa jal speaks about himself
in the Quran, does he tell you 50
% of the ayat that he is ready
to punish and 50% of the time
that he is, you know, kind and merciful
or his names, right?
Or his names, right?
No.
And the truth, this is not, this is
not what happens, right?
And we've done at least some quick analyses
and the ratio of his rahma and his,
uh, and his benevolence is far exceeding, right?
That of his ghadab and anything else.
So to be mindful of this, and I,
you know, give this example that, you know,
you wouldn't want to think about even your
parent as being nice half the time and
punishing half the time.
Imagine you walk home and you messed up
today, or you bring your test home, right?
And I got a C on my test,
right?
And if you have, you know, they see
you're out of parents, a C is not
going to go very well, right?
Then you go home and you say, you
know what, today, what's going to happen?
There's a 50% chance my dad is
going to punish me for the next month.
50% chance he's going to say, you
know what, no big deal, try harder next
time, right?
So this is like, no one can live
with a parent like this.
It's like you're having a 50-50, this
is kind of crazy, right?
No, you expect the default is my parents
are benevolent, they're understanding, they're kind, but they're
firm, right?
And because they're firm, there's lines I don't
cross.
And if I cross those lines, I know
that I open myself to certain consequences, right?
But this is the balance.
It starts with love, like forgiveness, clemency, gentleness,
but there's some borders you try not to
cross, right?
But I think we need to think about
the same way.
It's like our relationship with him is based
on love, right?
If you think about the definitions of Ibadah
we have, right?
What does Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah say,
right?
Al-hubb al-taam ma'dhul al-taam, right?
Half of the ingredient is absolute love.
So if we want to remove the love
part of it, we are actually going to
create a different distortion, which I want to
get into a bit here, which is this
notion of preaching that Allah is al-hakim,
right?
It's, maybe it's our Sharia background, so maybe
I'll speak about this as someone who did
Sharia.
Most Imams, I think very, most Imams in
America seem to have a background in Sharia.
This makes them think like jurists.
So the jurist thinks about halal and haram
all the time.
And so Allah is al-hakim.
He has a right to tell you what
to do.
Salvation is a mathematical equation.
Exactly, right?
Yeah.
Rather than being, no, he is al-hakim,
but he's also al-wali.
Like his rules are being done with love,
with care, with your concern, for your best
interest.
And this issue of like masaleh, right?
And mafasid and maqasid and these other things
need to come in there.
Because if you remove that, it's like, I
don't, why is God telling me to do
these things?
I don't understand it.
Is God just making my life difficult?
That's the image you end up absorbing, right?
It's like a, you know, it's a cold
God who's just testing you, doesn't want to
help you on the test.
And in many people, as they say, he's
almost looking forward to watching you fail.
And then we seek Allah's refuge from such
distortions.
But you hear people say that.
You hear people say that.
That, you know what, I can't please God.
He's impossible to please.
So then you run away from So this
is like khateebs keep very mindful of this
notion that is anything I'm saying gonna make
my audience think Allah is too hard to
please because you've set the bar so high
and that they're just going to check out
essentially, right?
And the human soul is looking to love
Allah and is looking to be loved by
Allah.
It's like inscribed in our souls.
And you know, I often share this story
of a sister.
I was invited to give a talk in
Queens College in New York City.
And the title was on the flyer was
Allah loves you.
And so I was only given a very
short span of time, I think like 20
minutes, and we started late.
So it was 15.
And the main keynote, Sheikh Fahd Taslim did
a wonderful job after me, but he had
the bulk of the time as well.
And so I was just warming them up.
So like, what do I do?
So I just strung together all of the
hadith about Allah's compassion and his mercy and
his clemency, and so on and so forth.
Anyway, a few days later, I get an
email from a sister.
She says, you know, I'm going through a
crisis of faith in general, very far from
the being I want to meet you.
And so I take my wife, of course,
take my wife, and I go meet the
sister on campus.
And I tell her, yeah, like, so what's
going on, sit down cafeteria, like buy her
some fries.
Just to get her on guarded, she was
very apprehensive.
And I told her, she's like, I don't
know what I believe.
I said, so how far back do we
need to rewind?
Like prophethood, Islam, God's existence, she's like God's
existence.
So I worked her through some of the
arguments for Allah's existence being undeniable and inborn
and rational and all of it combined.
And alhamdulillah, she was satisfied.
And she's been growing since, alhamdulillah.
But I remember leaving campus saying, what in
the world?
Like, if you're atheist, you don't believe there's
a God.
Why do you care if he loves you
or not?
So actually, what happened, I dropped the most
important part, is that when she emailed, she
said, I was not able to stay till
the end of the talk, I was overwhelmed
with emotion.
Like she had like, she was just crying
her eyes out, she walked out.
I was like, wait, but if God's a
fantasy, then all I'm saying is sort of,
but you want it to be true.
That's what I took away from it, that
the fitrah is like begging for, thirsty for.
There's a non-Muslim psychologist who's done a
lot of the fundamental work in the space.
She interviewed, she's a clinical psychologist, so she
interviewed tons of people.
And she said, every single person has a
God image, even the atheist.
Because when you ask the atheist, what do
you think God is like?
He'll tell you that God is incredibly harsh.
And that's why I'm angry.
And that's why I'm angry.
I'm angry at the God that doesn't exist.
So, you know, it's just fascinating.
There's a term for it, right?
Mesotheist, something like this?
Like angry at God, basically.
Mad at God.
But no, no, but I think you're right.
So it's fitrah, right?
That you have to make sense out of
this world.
Like, you know, everyone knows there's something that
has created this universe, but then they create
an image of it and then they reject
that, right?
Which to be honest, and she said this
in her own words, she goes, it's very,
she goes that sometimes their description of God
is rational to reject.
Because they have such a distorted image that
it makes sense to say, I don't want
to worship this God.
You want to drop it.
Exactly, you want to drop it, right?
It was because you assumed such of God
that you fell.
Exactly.
And this theme comes in the Quran, right?
Many, many, many, many times, right?
You know, the people, once you start to
have these, I find that interesting, by the
way, this term comes in the Quran numerous
times to speak about distortions in the image
of Allah, right?
You know, that it is one of the
roots of just leaving this faith completely, right?
And eroding one's faith is to have bad
assumptions of Allah, right?
It's coming back to this issue.
I don't know if you want to bring
it back to the the khateeb and the
oration, where do you want to go, right?
More as deep as you can.
Yeah, we want to go back to motivation
because for me, you know, this is what
I study for living day and night.
My whole dissertation was on human motivation.
I want to talk a little bit about
what we need to be doing with people,
right?
So what is poisonous is sometimes what people
think is even like prophetic or it's Quranic.
So when they'll say, for instance, that God
does not love and they'll begin to enumerate
those things, right?
Because you just told me you did the
talk and you said Allah loves and you
gave all those things.
But again, it goes back to your dosage
of these things.
So if you keep doing this, Allah does
not love and Allah hates, you end up
creating an association.
This is we want to come back to
being mindful as a khateeb.
Human beings have this fascinating ability that they
create emotions off of the words that they
hear associated with a word, right?
So I give this example many times.
If I take a word, if I take
something like a construct, I take ice cream,
right?
And I can destroy someone's perception of ice
cream very easily.
If I take a young child and I
give them ice cream as a kid, but
I make it like some nasty flavor, right?
So I give them like, you know, garlic
onion ice cream, right?
So you take some food, right?
And then you give this to a kid,
right?
You know, association over time.
And you told the kid after, you know,
you fed him this nasty ice cream a
year after or biryani ice cream.
Then he's like five years old and you
say, hey, would you like biryani ice cream?
He's like, man, I've had, this is the
most disgusting thing in the world.
The ice cream, the notion, even if you
want to give him chocolate, it's ruined, right?
Ice cream itself stands for something.
I know people that have told me firsthand
accounts of missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa that
come to villages and give out two chocolates.
One of them is called Muhammad.
One of them is called Jesus.
And the Muhammad one is bitter.
And the Jesus one is bursting with flavor.
They're sweet, right?
So this is like, you can do this
in numerous ways.
So this is one way.
The other way now I want to be
more direct on is your word.
So every time you invoke the name of
Allah and you're on the minbar, think about
what other adjectives and terms am I using?
Because a human being is creating a construct.
Allah, what is, who is Allah?
Well, whenever the Shaykh tells me about Allah,
I either see in his body language, he's
angry or he's yelling.
That's one way.
Or he's saying angry.
And it's true.
Allah is angry at certain things.
But again, the association is, I hear a
lot about his anger.
I hear a lot that he's upset.
I hear a lot that he's going to
punish.
So now when the word Allah comes up
in general, the association is something negative, right?
And I give this example to parents all
the time.
So when you get, if your kid does
something wrong and your default is say, Wallahi,
the kid associates the name of Allah Azzawajal
with something bad is about to go down,
right?
About to get slapped by my mom or
my dad.
So be very mindful, right?
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Think about doing the opposite.
How much do you say to people?
You can motivate someone for the exact same
behavior two ways.
Do you want to tell your congregation that
pray, Allah loves those who pray?
Or do you want to say pray because
Allah hates those who don't pray?
And be careful because one, like I said,
is going to create that short-term like,
you know, anxiety in your heart.
They'll pray the next prayer.
They'll pray the next prayer, right?
But then long-term, it's like, no, no,
I'm out of this stuff.
Verses, Allah loves it when I do this.
Allah loves it when I do that.
Allah loves people who seek forgiveness.
Allah loves, and then that builds that long
-term type of momentum, right?
So that, to me, is very, very, very
key because you are thinking strategically long-term,
right?
So I want more on this, but let
me share with you.
You just keep reminding me.
Dr. Muhammad Suma'i Al-Muqaddim, he is
a great Islamic scholar from Alexandria who is
a practicing psychiatrist.
And I remember once when he was giving
a how to get your children to pray.
He has a tape on it, wonderful tape.
He was speaking of the hadith of Amr
al-Mutha'ib from his father, from his
grandfather, instruct them at seven and sort of
like spank at ten, things like this.
Then he puts like a whole list of
requirements for the permissibility of lightly striking or
lightly spanking or whatnot.
And one of them was like, you can't
be angry.
It's like, what?
He goes, and if they mention the name
of Allah, you can't strike them.
He said because if you do it, you
are associating for them the name of Allah
with like sort of a mild, supposedly traumatic
experience or potentially traumatic experience.
Let me not say supposedly.
Another one, subhanAllah, associating words with feelings, Shaykh
Abu Saakh al-Huwaini came to mind just
now.
I remember one time, and he prefaced this
very carefully.
He said that, you know, I found myself
going down a rabbit hole of looking through
all of the language of the Qur'an.
Allah Azza wa Jal never said he hated
anyone.
He loves many classes of people, never said
he hated anyone.
I know this could sort of be problematic.
What did he say?
He said, the only one I found with
the word kurh, hate, is the action.
Hated with Allah is this evil act.
He said, but when it was with people,
it was la yuhibbu al-kafirin.
He said, I stopped for a long, he
said, I spent a whole night looking for
it.
I wish I could have attributed it to
a bigger scholar so I could be more
confident in it.
He said, but the only thing that came
to mind, and I seek Allah's forgiveness if
it's wrong, he was being very careful about
not having an unprecedented view.
But he said, perhaps the wisdom is that
Allah, when it came to people, not acts,
him saying he does not love as opposed
to he hates, is that it reminds them
of loving, reminds them that they can be
loved.
That's beautiful.
And this notion, I mean, it actually comes
in many other places in Maryam alayhis salaam,
the Quran as well.
It didn't say you are an evil person.
It's this thing you have done, right, is
the issue here.
So the Quran is very careful to stipulate
that it's actions that are very, very problematic,
and not to kind of make the person
themselves feel incredibly shameful.
Exactly right.
And this is what we found in our
own research is that people who think of
Allah in a much more negative fashion, they
are much more full of shame, but not
a good, not a healthy shame, right, a
detrimental shame that actually makes them think low
of themselves, and makes them think about themselves,
this is a term, that they block compassion.
So actually, they don't believe, and I've done
this before, I was at a youth camp,
and I was talking to kids about this,
they don't believe they're worthy of Allah's forgiveness,
because they've internalized they're so evil, or they're
so bad, that patheticness.
Yes.
So actually, when you tell them hadith about
Allah's forgiveness, they actually start to get shocked.
I remember, I was speaking to about 150
high schoolers, and I told them it's a
hadith about, you know, the prostitute who was
forgiven, right, and you know, this man who
killed 100 people who was forgiven.
And their default reaction is like, why should
Allah forgive them?
And then it extends to, like, yeah, exactly.
So Alhamdulillah, Allah is the judge, and we're
not the judge.
But it's this blocking compassion is a very
real thing, especially in people who have been
shamed.
So if you shame your congregation over and
over again, they will internalize that I am
not worthy of Allah's love, I'm not worthy
of His forgiveness, and if He wants to
offer it to me, I'm going to run
away from it, right?
So it's not, in this case, right?
So people run away from Allah.
So I mean, there's a number of things
we can get into, but yeah.
So Allah's punishment, Allah's anger, body language.
How about, we've spoken about this prior, the
idea of the ummah has never been worse,
or sort of like, it comes in different
forms, right?
Sometimes it's like the khateeb using the 15
minute as a new cycle about sort of
the pains of the ummah.
At times it's almost like trying to say
we are the root cause of it all.
The people in this particular message right now,
so the floor is yours.
Yeah, I mean, this falls under the hadith
we began with, right?
Bashiru wa la tunafiru, like giving glad tidings,
right?
And trying to make people think optimistically about
the future is from, of course, nabuwa, right?
The Prophet, you know, was incredibly optimistic, right?
And the hadith about that are plenty.
So it's a disease of a religious leader
or of a speaker to begin to put
yes in people's hearts, right?
That he himself may have this level of
despair, because they see it, right?
I mean, sometimes we're front and center and
we see all the all the bad that's
happening in people's individual lives, or following the
news more closely in the global events of
the ummah.
So we are transmitting some of our own
pain, right?
I mean, of course, if you're sitting on
social media, and you're seeing, you know, the
horrific events in the world, and then you
get on the minbar and you speak about
that, right?
You're transmitting that pain to other people.
So it's from, I think, from wisdom, to
be able to compartmentalize your own pain, and
to make sure you give people hope for
the future, right?
The companions, the circumstances they were in.
Think about Al-Hizab, right?
The situation to me is so beautiful, right?
They're literally, you know, sahaba are scared to
death, right?
Rocks around their stomachs, the prophet peace be
upon him.
They think that their, you know, their lives
might come to, the Qur'an tells you
this is the time they started to have
some bad thoughts about Allah azza wa jal,
right?
And what did the prophet do during that
time?
That's when he started to tell them.
He strikes the rock, right?
And the spark flies.
He says, you know, we're going to open
this land, Sham, and Yemen, and Persia.
Like that was very strategic, right?
Very strategic.
That wasn't one time, there's a pattern of
this.
Exactly.
So he's sharing glad tidings.
Exactly, right?
Yeah.
So that is something that I actually remember.
He had this breakdown of, is grief praiseworthy?
Because sometimes like we're almost venting to each
other, or like trying to be therapeutic for
each other, but it's counterproductive, right?
Or maybe we're trying to even sedate our
guilt to make sure that we are, you
know, feeling the pain of the ummah.
And he says, listen, it'll fall in one
of three categories.
He says, number one, if the pain, sadness
is coming as a result of something else,
like they cried because they couldn't afford a
riding mount, so they missed out on the
reward opportunity of being in jihad alongside the
prophet, he said, that's praiseworthy.
He says, the second category is when you're
seeking to almost extend or accentuate your sadness.
He said, this is not praiseworthy whatsoever.
He said, you'll never find this praise in
the Quran because it's not beneficial.
Maybe do it for yourself.
Like, I feel like I should be sadder
for the loss of X or Y or
Z.
He said, but actually, no, it's a ruse.
That's why you'll never find an ayah or
hadith praising sadness in and of itself.
He said, actually, here's the third category, it's
the kicker.
He says that there's times when sadness is
prohibited, and that is when it gets in
the way of your religious obligations.
Then he says, such as lamenting too much
on the calamities that befall the Muslims, diminishing
your capacity for patience, he says, and demoralizing
you from jihad, from like getting on sort
of the rebuild, the offensive.
I was like, wow, how often does that
happen?
Like, you just feel like, where do I
start?
Like, what do I do?
How can I help?
And we even noticed this, if you remember,
we had a marketing type discussion at Yaqeen
about there got to a point with the
news regarding Gaza, where it wasn't circulating anymore.
People just like, they gassed out.
And the things that were actually catching the
algorithm were the bright spots, like the efficacy
of a boycott.
So like optimism, right?
Oh, I can put a dent in this
monster.
I can sort of begin to move the
needle in a better direction.
And that's what people are looking for.
They're coming to the masjid with that sadness
and looking for something to pull them out
of it.
And if you just double down on it
and be like, let's just be additionally sad
and make them sadder, you have fundamentally failed
in your role, right?
Especially for that 15 minutes that you were
trying to bring them out of their slumber.
The data we collected on Gaza was clear.
People who were hopeless, it really, really drove
them away from doing behaviors that would actually
be beneficial, right?
Because you just hit a point of like,
what's the point of doing any of this
stuff, right?
SubhanAllah, the scholars of tafsir, I even heard
one of them saying, and I want to
close out the episode.
I'll share this one anecdote, but maybe any
other sort of pet peeves, we'll have entire
episodes inshallah on like ways to put together
a good khutbah and the likes.
But any pet peeves you have regarding preaching,
since we're on it, that can be helpful
towards maximizing this amanah, this trust of having
people's attention for 15 minutes.
I'd love to close out with that.
But the scholars of tafsir, they point out
that when people are coming to you, like
in simplest terms, the believer, he's already a
believer, he's already a musalli or something of
this nature.
He said, Dhul Qarnayn, when he gave them
a lecture, basically, when he had a public
address, he spoke to them very, in reverse
order, very differently, in a reverse order than
he spoke to the corrupt.
He said, in Surat al-Kahf, Dhul Qarnayn
said to them, you know, as for the
oppressive, I'm going to punish them severely, and
then they're going to be sent back to
their Lord, who is going to give them
an even worse punishment, right?
It has to start there for a lot
of people, right?
The cracking of the whip, the wajal.
He said, wa amma man aamana wa amila
as-saliha, as for those who believe in
work righteousness, falahu jaza'an al-husna, they
will have a great reward.
He didn't say the same order.
He mentioned akhira first.
And I'll speak to them nicely.
I'll have lenient governance with them.
Falahu jaza'an al-husna, wasana qulu lahu
min amrina yusra, and we will speak to
them or sort of address them mildly.
And so those that are coming, they're coming
for the bushra.
They're coming for the positivity.
And so we're not saying overcompensate and create
another imbalance, but please be cognizant of people's
needs.
And the only thing that's going to work,
there's going to be no shortcut here.
There's not going to be any quick fix,
firecracker quick fix, inshallah.
So any final pet peeves, rattle them off.
There's a number.
All right, let's start with the top.
So one is this notion that especially as
our communities become more and more educated and
fluent in English and very accomplished professionally, there's
been a lot of feedback from the communities
that they feel like their khateebs are not
speaking to their intellects.
And so I want to come to the
hadith of Prophet Islam, right, when he talks
about it.
Actually, more a tribute to Ali ibn Abi
Talib, right, where he speaks about speak to
people in ways which they can understand, right?
Do you want them to reject Allah and
his messenger?
And I think that people sometimes, most khateebs
have heard this hadith, but they think it
means don't say something that's overly complicated.
And so they go to the other extreme,
which is to speak like everything's a Sunday
school khutbah.
And this is also a way of actually
rejecting Allah and his messenger, because someone is
coming to the khutbah, and he's an educated
man or a woman, and saying, I'm looking
for something deep to understand the complexity of
this world.
And you're telling me the best that you
have to offer is like this Mickey Mouse
level of faith.
And as someone said this, you know, we're
talking, I forgot who it was now.
He was a non-Muslim in a book.
He talked about how we have degrees advanced
in medicine, engineering, and all these fields.
But if we have a Sunday school education
of religion, then the envelope is going to
tip to saying, you know what, religion is
actually very superficial.
Religion actually doesn't answer my questions in life.
So my pet peeve here...
It is a hard balance.
I see it.
Is that you have to be able to
speak to everybody in the crowd.
The merger of audiences is tough.
Yeah.
But this is a really, really big thing.
It's really, to me, a key because it
is a fitna to people who are looking
for answers to not give them answers, right?
So number one is speak to people, respect
their intelligence, right?
Respect their intelligence, not just in the worldly
domain, but also in religion.
Just because you're not a khatib doesn't mean
that you haven't studied Islam, you have some
ability.
So even if you drop a gem for
that person, one gem, it takes 30 seconds
from your 15 minutes, it suffices that person,
right?
So that's definitely, I think, one thing.
Number two is, this is an Azhari thing
for me.
I learned in Azhar that the Moshayekh do
not use papers, right?
All right.
So it's not that I'm against using notes,
but this reliance on pages and pages of
notes removes the confidence from the audience, you
know what you're speaking about, right?
And it's...
This is a sort of a cultural variable,
but I do think...
I was actually in a phase where I
didn't respect the khatib if he had notes.
And then I found reports that Imam Ahmad
would...
Actually, it was common among scholars of hadith.
Out of pious caution, they would only recite
the hadith from a book, some of them,
just because the words of the Prophet, you
know, need to be extra careful with because
the trickle effect across generations.
Of course.
Of course.
But then I realized that, no, I can
still have a middle view here that like,
sure, it could be piety to be reading
from a paper, but when you're giving a
reminder and the cultural variable will say that
you look like you're pretending to know what
you're talking about, then no, it's worth spending
some time, try your best, organize your thoughts,
have bullet points only, don't script it.
I tell people take the khutbah, think about
it like your Super Bowl commercial, right?
It's that the people who have to be
there, who otherwise wouldn't be there, and how
much time you should put in.
More time should go into preparing your khutbah
than probably most of the other things that
you do during the week, right?
For your dars, right?
Because you're trying to really bring people to
Allah Azzawajal, and the dars that you're giving
to serious students, they're already committed, right?
You can come and, you know, you can
say what you want, and they're not going
to need that extra push.
All right, last thing I'll mention in closing
is that, is actually connect with people, right,
before you actually advise them to do anything,
right?
So I don't believe, many khateebs think their
role is to be a public speaker, as
to walk into the masjid, five minutes for
the khutbah, give the khutbah, walk off the
minbar and leave.
This is not a way that is going
towards, not how the prophet peace be upon
him had dealt with his companions, that in
the necessity of mixing with the people and
connecting with their hearts, first at a human
level, before you get up and you speak
to them.
Once you do that, the most, and I
found this, sometimes I used to reflect, I'd
listen to a khutbah by a well, you
know, well-known mashayikh, and sometimes I'm like,
that doesn't seem that profound, but because he's
so beloved to the people, that the sentence
he says, that maybe another shaykh could have
said it, sort of, they cling to it,
they cling to it, right?
And they're just like, they find hidayah, and
they find nur in that, right?
And it just used to puzzle me for
years, because I'm just thinking and looking at
it from an analytical perspective, the quality of
the speech, I said, it's nothing to do
with the speech, it has to do with
his connection with the people and their hearts,
and so, just like a joke, you know,
a joke, someone you like, it's not even
funny, like, but because a certain person said
it, it gave it all the value in
the world, exactly, subhanAllah, yeah, yeah, so connecting
with the people, I remember Shaykh Hassid Birjas,
actually, who I need to trap him somewhere
and do like 12 episodes with him, because
he's becoming a leader for leaders across the
country, and hopefully, he executes on his intention
to publish some books on religious leadership in
the United States and beyond, but he said
that he got into the habit now of
making, sort of, the bare minimum dhikr, and
making the rest of it at the door,
to give salam to everyone as they're exiting.
That's beautiful.
And, you know, rahimahullah, may Allah have mercy
on our good brother, Big Mike Salahuddin.
Big Mike was the, you remember the N1
mixtapes?
Of course.
The streetball hooper.
Who doesn't remember N1 mixtapes?
Or AJ, or dating ourself, carbon dating ourself
at this point, but he was actually the
coach.
MashaAllah.
And he took his shahadah, alhamdulillah, in New
York City with us, with our crew.
He passed away months ago, a few months
ago.
He was just one of the most incredible
human beings, like, gentle, giant, kind soul.
He was taking care of his grandmother till
he was, like, 62.
He was 62.
And he used to always, like, he doesn't
know that I, even if I wasn't religious,
I would have gravitated towards him, because, like,
N1, and we grew up in this culture
and stuff.
Every single gathering we sit in, he's like,
you know that guy, Shinawi?
In the middle of nowhere, after his talk,
I was sitting in the corner, he walks
through the crowd, comes and gives me salam.
I'm just like, bro, I think you're a
celebrity.
I'm not the celebrity.
But he saw me as a celebrity of
a certain context, and making time for someone
like him.
And likewise, for, like, the khatib to see,
oh, I'm in a rush to go to
work, and you're trying to intercept me to
give me salams.
It means the world to them.
You're approachable, you care, you're not just interesting,
but you're interested.
That's how to, like, win friends and influence
people, as Carnegie said.
It's a profound concept that our Prophet Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam left us with.
Any final thoughts?
I think that's the last thing to end
on, is that just to reflect over these
things.
Sometimes we transmit so much of what the
hadith, the touch, and those interactions, right?
So I always give that story of Mu
'adh ibn Jabal, when he teaches a famous
du'a, like, Mu'adh narrates the hadith,
but he's narrating the whole interaction, actually, right?
And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam came, grabbed
him by the hand, right?
He told me, I love you.
So, like, those things, if you remember it
as a speaker, they say, I want people
to remember my words.
Like, go and connect with them on that
human level.
Touch them, hug them.
Actually, Sheikh Haytham al-Haddad just told me
this last week here at the Prophetic Summit,
right, that we were at recently.
He said, sometimes people, they just need a
hug.
He's like, there's all these intellectual, they come
to you with all these intellectual issues.
He's like, brother, you know, he seems like
he's all tough.
He said, he just needs a hug and
he's good to go, right?
You defuse the bomb.
You disarm the bomb.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's so true.
Even Abdullah ibn Abbas, right?
Same thing.
He says the hadith, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi
Wasallam came, he hugged me, and then he
said, oh Allah, you know, increase him in
his knowledge and all these things.
So, like, these are not just, like, people
think that it's just, like, descriptive of the
seerah.
Like, it's just, no, no, no.
It actually is the secret sauce in how
the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam transformed societies.
And so, you could probably forget the dua
that he said, but if you remembered the
human interaction and you practiced that, you'd probably
be better off, right, as a person in
the masjid, if you're a youth director, right,
if you're the khateeb, you're the imam, you're
anyone else, because you are ultimately transmitting who
Allah is through your own behavior, because they're
seeing who is God, well, the people who
speak about God must know what God is
like.
So, if they're, like, harsh and mean and
cruel, God must be like that, and if
they're gentle and they're kind and they're forgiving,
then God must be like that, right?
And so, I'll end on that note.
I shared this in a previous episode, but
one of the really good brothers in the
community that I love deeply, he came and
told me, Hamad Luqman, no one comes to
listen to your khutbah because of your knowledge.
There's way more knowledgeable people on YouTube.
They're coming to see how has the deen
sort of radiated through you.
Do you have more inner peace?
Do you have more sort of compassion and
consideration for people?
And I was like, wow, that is so
profound.
And he's not, subhanAllah, like not in the
scholarly class or anything, but he gets it,
and sort of he tried to remind me
so I can get it.
This is everything, subhanAllah, this is sort of
the prophetic way, and may Allah help us
inch closer and closer to it.
Jazakallah khairan.
Everyone, once again, throw your comments and your
questions and suggestions for what we need to
discuss, step by step, leveling ourselves up and
improving the quality of our masajid.
May Allah help us all reflect his light
to the world and allow the lighthouses of
Allah, these masajid, to optimize.
BarakAllahu fi for your time.