Nouman Ali Khan – Building a Legacy of Gratitude
AI: Summary ©
The concept of shukuf, a fruit used to express gratitude to parents, is discussed in Islam's "Grader" concept, where individuals reach a certain age and become more grateful. The importance of gratitude and being grateful for things that happen in one's life is emphasized, along with the need for everyone to use their resources and use them for a greater service. The success of Islam- ignoreing culture and profitability in the future are also discussed, along with the importance of showing gratitude and empowerment through gratitude to improve one's mental health and achieve life goals.AI: Transcript ©
It's an honor to be here, and I
pray that this khubah is of some benefit
to myself and to all of you. Today,
I
hope to share
some reflections on a concept that may be
very familiar to all of us, if not
most of us, and that's the concept of
shukuf, of gratitude,
that Allah mentions
exhaustively in the Quran.
In fact, the meanings of shukuf
or gratitude is already embedded
inside the word hamd
When we recite the fatiha which is the
most common thing, common part of the Quran
that a Muslim recites, when we say alhamdulillah,
the meanings of shukr are part of the
meanings of hamd. Hamd is a shukr is
a subset
of hamd. Hamd is more than that. It
includes praise also and includes a very particular
kind of gratitude, but shukr is certainly a
part of that. Shukr is something that you
may be familiar with as something we have
to do to Allah, showing gratitude to Allah,
being grateful for Allah.
And Allah will put that next to himself
and both of our parents.
Be grateful to me and be grateful to
both of your parents.
So, this is a concept that occurs across
the Quran. In fact, one one of the
most famous places in the Quran where a
father is
ensuring good upbringing for his son, the height
of wisdom.
Allah says,
you
know,
Right? That Allah gave Luqman wisdom.
And the summary of all of the wisdom
Allah gave Luqman was
be grateful to Allah.
To understand that you must become a grateful
person to Allah. So you read every other
wisdom that Nuqman gave to his son in
Surat Nuqman from ayah number 12 onwards,
all of them go back to shukr.
Every one of them is a manifestation of
shukr.
But the reason I wanted to dedicate today's
khutba to this concept is because we think
of gratitude as something passive.
We think of it as something good happened
and we say, Alhamdulillah
or we thank Allah. Right? So we think
of it as a reaction.
Gratitude is actually a reaction to something that
has happened.
But the Quran is actually giving two sides
of shukr. One of them we are familiar
with. The other one that's mentioned also in
Allah's book, we don't often talk about. And
I think it's important especially given the times
we live in, that we should highlight
this dimension of the Shukr of Allah also.
I'll start by a dua that Allah mentions
that
a man reaching the age of 40,
He makes a dua to Allah. 4040 is
an important age in
Quran and in Arabic literature also because 40
is an age when a person has reached
in a sense full maturity.
If you look at it from a sociological
perspective, many people
are trying to find themselves in college or
getting their getting their bearings together early on
in their twenties. Right? And if some of
a young man gets married, you know, and
they have a child in their twenties, they're
just between
fixing up their career, securing some savings, taking
care of the baby. They're juggling all these
things and they're kind of It's a bumpy
ride. Right? And then in thirties,
things start to settle down a little bit.
You start to figure out some things. And
by 40, you have some level of clarity.
Socially speaking, economically speaking,
there's a settlement that happens in life. Right?
So now that in a sense,
matters of life are settled,
things are sort of put in place. Now
it's time to think about more important things.
Now you're not distracted,
right? So it's the same way that in
the world of business,
you can have day to day tasks,
right? Somebody opens up a restaurant, they gotta
fix the countertop, they gotta fix the chair,
they gotta fix the menu,
the the cook, this, that, the other, and
they're just running all over the place. Right?
And when they're doing that, they're just trying
to manage. They're just trying to run the
thing before it falls apart. Maintain if if
you will. They're just working on maintenance. But
when the restaurant that's been a few years,
it's established,
it's settled, things are in place, now you
can think about growing the business. Now you
can think about bigger things. We restaurant owners
might even start thinking about retirement.
Right? I wanna get out of this now,
do other things with my life, etcetera, etcetera.
Right? So there's a turbulent time in one's
life and then there's a settlement and after
settlement, you think your horizons get bigger. You
can't even think about bigger things until things
settle down somewhat.
Right? Then until then you can't even imagine
that scenario.
So what Allah mentions as Arba'ina Sanah is
kind of that standard age
of things have been settled.
The kids have grown, they've grown enough that
they're independent themselves,
that the ambitions I had in life, the
worries
4th
And I use the word youth knowingly. I
know we like, how is a 40 year
old young? Well, you're young enough to stand
straight up. You're not on a cane.
Right? You don't need assistance to go to
the bathroom.
Your body is fully functional. You're capable.
In fact, in many ways, you're more capable
now,
Maybe if not physically, but you're more capable
now socially, intellectually, psychologically,
in terms of maturity, in terms of experience.
You're more capable now than you ever were
before. And you look back at your twenties
and you say, man, I was so stupid.
Why did I do that?
If I just if I could just talk
to my 25 year old self and just
give him a good old slap, things will
turn out different. You you could do that.
You could look back and say that. Right?
So now you're at a certain age. Now
what does Allah say about that age? He
says, awzirni.
The person reaches 40 years, the mature believer
reaches 40 years and he makes a du'a.
My master empower me
was actually tuziyyah, modern Arabic means to spread
something.
Right? But oza'a means to actually empower someone,
to enable someone, to give someone strength,
to do what? To be grateful to the
blessing you gave me.
That's the dua you're making. I need to
look. I need to become grateful now.
So the question that is, what is this
gratitude? What's he talking about? What's this person
talking about when he says, Arishqur Niamatak Altatiya
You
find that the words in the Quran are
never accidental. It's Allah speaks very deliberately and
very precisely.
So these words, this dua in its exact
wording
is again mentioned by Soleiman
It's mentioned by Soleiman none other than Soleiman
alaihis salam.
And he says,
In the story of the hudhud, he mentioned
these exact words. So the question is, why
is Allah making me say a dua
and he's teaching me in my forties to
make a dua
that he is echoing
from 1000 of years before the coming of
the Quran
on the tongue of a great Prophet, Sulaiman
alaihis salam. The thing you should note about
both Sulaiman alaihis salam and Dawud alaihis salam
is that they are exceptional prophets. Why are
they exceptional? Because most prophets
in their careers
were in a position of political, economic, social
weakness,
and their enemies were in a position of
power. That is the story of most of
the Prophets. Nuh
is in a position of weakness, he's being
mocked, he's being ridiculed, he's being attacked, and
the people that are kuffar are in a
position of power. In the beginning of the
seerah of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam,
our messenger is be is among the yatama
actually.
Right? That's why he's being told,
Right?
And he's in that position, and the people
around him are,
These are the riffraff of society around him,
they're not the millionaires and the billionaires.
There's no Jeff Bezos next to the Prophet
There's no governor next to the Prophet salallahu
alaihi wasalam. And even one influential person comes
in like Umar ibn Khattab or another, hamza
radiAllahu ta'ala. It's a huge boost to Islam
because the majority of those types of people
are on the other side.
Right? It's kinda like nowadays when we feel
Muslims feel socially weak, one celebrity becomes Muslim
and we're like, oh my god. This is
so old. You know? Do you know you
became a you know who's Muslim? That guy
you know, and we have a collection of
famous people that are Muslim. Like we got
one. Oh, we got another one.
Right? And that's That in itself is a
demonstration of weakness.
Right? Like the other civilizations that are in
a position of winning, they don't say, you
know who else is Christian? Let me show
you. They won't do that.
They won't do that, right? So it's a
demonstration of our weakness. Anyway,
the thing I wanted to get to
is something about both Dawud
They
are in a position of power.
And in that position of power, Allah, one
place in the Quran in Surat Saba describes
some of what they were doing.
So Allah says,
He says he tells Dawud alaihis salam, he
tells his family meaning Suleiman alaihis salam his
offspring. He tells him,
I need you to work on creating precise
sheets of metal.
Sabahra in Arabic is to spread something like
Right. Is to spread something. So, you know,
when you're when you're working with metals, you
have to have very precise measurements. You can
think nowadays of like car manufacturing
and the parts have to be precisely cut
and molded to exact measurements in engineering, right?
Or in like parts of a plane or
something like that. So Allah is giving him
instructions,
You have to be very precise in your
engineering.
And make sure the links in the chain
are all precisely measured.
That's what Allah is telling him. He's giving
him engineering precision is what Allah is giving
him. And then he says,
And then Allah tells them, I am watching
over what you're doing.
I'm watching over what you're doing. And then
after that, Allah mentions the power Allah gave
to Sulaiman alaihis salam over the winds.
But I'll go forward and tell you something
remarkable Allah says, Yeah. The jinns were working
for Sulaiman, They
used to make for work for him, creating
for him weapons of war. So they used
to build, you know,
you could say they were doing the metal
work and they were built the the the
the blacksmiths, they were making the axes and
the spears and the swords and all that
kind of stuff and the armor also.
Filled large
pots, you know those large kettles that have
molten metal inside them. Allah is describing the
factory actually in the Quran where all of
this work is going on.
But here's why I brought all that up.
I started this khuba talking about gratitude,
being something passive,
being something that you something good happens to
you and you show gratefulness to Allah. In
fact, we even say something bad happens to
you, find the good at it and be
grateful to Allah. That's what we
say. Allah then says to both,
to Dawud and his family now, Sulaiman, the
next generation, He says to them
He says, family of David, family of Dawud,
du shukr. It's in the same ayah where
the factory was being described.
Family of Da'ud,
du shukr.
They're not Allah is not telling them to
sit there and say Alhamdulillah.
That's already understood.
He's not telling them to say shukr.
He's telling them to do Shukr.
So what in the world does doing Shukr
I mean, when we think of do shukr,
we say Alhamdulillah. We say something. But
Allah is telling him to do something, not
say something, to do something. And then he
says, he ends by saying, wakaleelum minaibadi
shakoor.
And how few of my slaves
tend to be
well and grateful,
like deeply grateful. So
extremely grateful or truly grateful.
How few turn out that way? In other
words, gratitude to Allah is more than lip
service. Gratitude to Allah is more than a
reaction.
Allah is inspiring
both of these prophets to produce something,
to take the resources that they have,
melt them, make them into precise cuts, turn
them into something else,
build and build and build. And that building,
that act of building and developing,
that act that is going to go far
beyond their lifetimes.
Because once the, you know, once a factory
is built, the factory owner can die. The
factory will keep going.
Once the car manufacturer has designed the engine,
once the engine has been designed, it will
be enhancements to it, but the engines already
there. The car industry will go on. The
inventor will not remain, but the invention will
remain. That's the history of the world.
There's a reason we have the wheel. The
the guy who figured it out is not
here.
We're all using it.
Allah is telling both of these prophets
whatever resources are at your disposal.
When you make full use of them,
when you make full of the full use
of them and they know everything they're building,
everything they're
they're amassing, they're doing it for a greater
service, they're not doing it for themselves,
then this is actually shukr.
This this that's actually you are doing sukr.
So we have this passive concept of sukr
which is,
hey, let's just say one of you in
this community owns a small restaurant.
Let's just say, I'll give you a restaurant.
I'm in the restaurant mood, so I'll give
you a restaurant example. This is a small
restaurant you all right? And you're like, it
brings enough money, it pays the bill, Alhamdulillah.
Somebody comes to you and says, hey, I
think you can improve
the quality of this place. I think you
can expand it. I think you can brand
it better. I think you can branch out.
I think you can open up multiple chains.
You can become a friend. You know, this
can become 50 restaurants in 5 years.
This can happen. You have the quality. You
can No, no. I just wanna be grateful
for what I have. And alhamdulillah Allah has
given enough. No, no, no. Don't bother me
with these things. I don't want duniya.
But imagine for a moment, if there are
50 restaurants, and then one day there are
500 restaurants, and there are 5,000 just imagine.
Just use your imagination a little bit. Think
big. One day when it's 5,000 or 50000
restaurants, isn't that competing with McDonald's?
Isn't that funding going to help influence foreign
policy?
Isn't that going to influence how a campaign
is going to run
and a a political campaign is going to
run? Isn't that going to replace the need
for standing inside outside of an outside of
an embassy and yelling and screaming and them
laughing sitting inside?
Is that not going to replace it? Is
that when
you're building something, if you're building it for
yourself,
if you wanna build yourself a nicer house
with a
bigger restaurant, you're gonna get a nicer car.
It's still a car. It's still got an
engine. It's still got a c seat. It's
still still got a steering wheel. It's just
a nicer steering wheel.
It's just a it's just a little cushier
seat, but you're still sitting on it. You
can't, you know, you can't cut it open
and feel the material inside.
It's still the same. But if you have
a vision to build something big
and expand it. Now imagine, just for that,
take that one example for a moment of
the restaurants. If somebody owned 5 if a
Muslim owned 5,000 restaurants, how much more sadaqa
are they able to give? How much more
zakat are they giving? How many more people
have halal jobs because of them? How many
more people are now being influenced by an
ethical business
that is not involved in bribery. It's not
involved in buying off politicians. It's not involved
in, you know, usurping the the infrastructure of
a community. I was watching a a recent
exposing documentary on dollar generals in this country.
Wherever they go, they destroy local businesses.
There are actually food shortages in the United
States where there's a Dollar General because the
local mom and pop shop that's trying to
sell some vegetables can't survive anymore. So now
people have to drive 15, 20 miles to
buy basic fruits and vegetables
because a dollar general exists.
And now people are being malnourished in this
country because of big business
because of big business.
Now imagine if Muslims understood that we are
just the Muslims in the United States even
for starters. We're in a country that is
built on entrepreneurship.
The entire thing is built on entrepreneurship. There's
old money and there's new money. We all
know that.
And if we understood that this
resource and this opportunity that Allah has given
us, we have to put it to work
to show shukr to Allah, We would be
part of an economic engine. We would be
part of a we would be a machinery
by ourselves that is difficult to mess with.
It's difficult to mess with.
This is something Allah taught us in the
Quran. You can't just be grateful, you have
to do
grateful.
You have to do grateful.
And we have to develop that empowering mentality.
If young people sitting here that are going
to university, the East Coast of the United
States where where you guys live, the East
Coast is the is the hub of universities
in this country. There are more universities here
than probably anywhere else in the world, the
concentration of education here. But most most people
that are trying to get an education, yeah,
just trying to get a job. Just trying
to get you're you're trying to make somebody
else rich,
which is great. Start off that way. I'm
happy for you. Get a job, gain the
experience, learn from people that know more than
you. But if your entire
aspirations end with you
Yeah. By the time I'm this old, I
wanna have this. By the time I'm that
old, I wanna have this and have wanna
have these investments.
You're not thinking bigger.
Learn to think bigger. Learn to think with
shukr.
And what does Allah do if you show
gratitude?
If you and if you we, you and
I become people of shukr, not just by
words but by actions. What does Allah do?
What is Allah's promise?
If you can show gratitude,
I promise you, I swear by it, I
will enhance you and enhance you and continue
to enhance you, continue to increase you. You
and the stuff you own. You and your
knowledge, you and your sincerity, you and your
ibadah, you and your resources,
all of it will continue to increase.
It will continue to expand.
But understand, after all of that,
as I conclude this,
after all of that, you might say, oh,
this was a this was a khutbalang. This
might as well been a Joel Joel Steen
talk because they're all about prosperity gospel. They
just want people to become rich. Jesus wants
you to get that new Mercedes. He wants
you to open up that new restaurant because
he wants good Christians to prosper.
Right? And it was like, this is like
this is the Muslim version of he wants
good Christians to prosper. He want I want
Muslims. No. I don't care about your prosperity.
I'll be honest with you.
This is not about your prosperity.
This is about the nirma
and the amana that Allah gave a human
being, the ability that Allah gave a human
being, the money that Allah gave a human
being, the resources, the opportunity that Allah gave
a human being to put that to 100%
maximum use to produce the most amount of
benefit.
To produce the most amount of benefit.
And while doing all of that, not for
a moment do you think, yo, you know
what I did?
5000 restaurant. No. No. No. Shut up.
No. You did nothing. I did nothing.
You and I can't accomplish
what Dhul Qurnayn accomplished. He's he's to me,
he he should be studied very carefully especially
by you.
When he goes and travels the world and
establishes
empire in different societies, at the end of
it all, at the end of it all,
what's his final statement? And some people confused,
come say, well he might have been Alexander
the Great. Let me help you with that
confusion. He was not Alexander the Great. Alexander
the Great thought Alexander was great.
And Dhul Qurnayn
at the end of his entire career What
is he?
This, everything I've been able to accomplish is
arrahma from my rabb. Study Alexander, you'll find
he's really obsessed not with God but with
himself.
That's not
Alexander. But whoever he is, one thing we
know, he accomplishes the most amazing things and
at the end of all of that what
does he say? This is arrahma from my
Rabb.
This is an act of loving mercy after
he engineers the wall that prevents ya'ajud and
ajud from coming. He says,
And as amazing as that accomplishment is to
build such a dam with literally no time
because the raiding army is coming, Literally with
people that have no background in construction
and he's getting them till teaching them and
building at the same time. So imagine the
the laboratory
project is the final product. That's what he's
doing.
And after that incredible accomplishment,
he says,
And I know as much as this is
impressive and this is a rahma from Allah,
when its time comes, Allah will crush this
to nothing also.
So some of you might be nihilistic
and you might have this, you
know, fatalistic view. Fatalistic view of life like,
why do you want me to build 5,000
restaurants and expand and own a university and
start hospitals? Why do you want me to
do that? It's all gonna become nothing in
the end. Allah will destroy everything.
All the buildings will be crushed. Everything will
be mud on judgement day.
Yeah. That's
judgement day.
That's not now.
Now Allah said, Do this. Why is Allah
making Dawud
build a factory and putting the jinns to
work? Why isn't He telling you, why are
you even bothering? Judgment is coming just sit
down and just do a strip it in
in a corner.
Why is he telling him to do it?
Why is he'll come name building a wall?
He could just say, let him come. Judgment
day is coming anyway. You'll be shayeed. It's
okay.
Why?
Our mentality
sometimes our passive mentality,
don't do,
don't build,
don't expand khair. And because it's the more
spiritual thing to do, our spirituality goes against
the spirituality of the Quran itself.
We need a we need a cleanse from
our corrupted thinking which we think is spiritual
in nature. It's not.
It's not. These are influences that are not
from the book of Allah. These are other
influences. Our book, everything is in balance. Work
really hard to build knowing it's temporary and
when it comes and when it goes, that's
in the hands of Allah like my own
life.
Just because I'm planning for the next 50
years, doesn't mean I know I will live
the next 50 years. I can plan for
the next 50 years and be aware I
could be dead in an hour or less.
I could do both at the same time.
That's what Allah expects. This is the mentality
that Allah expects. And this is a mindset
that can take any nation, any people from
a position of weakness to a position of
great strength,
from position of great strength. The last thing
I'll share with you today because this is
about really it is about empowerment through gratitude.
That's that's what the message of this khubba
is. I want to share one thing with
you. Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
compared the ummah kajasads.
The the entire ummah was compared to 1
body. Now tell me if a person is
sick, one body is sick,
right? And they have a stomach problem,
or they have a lot of allergies, or
whatever they have, or they're very weak.
And you say how do I improve this
person?
How do I improve them?
And you say you should eat healthy. What's
the point?
You should exercise. No. No. What's the point?
It's life is temporary. What are you gonna
do?
The body is sick. But before the body
is sick, you know what's sick? The person's
mind.
They're not willing to make any take any
steps to fix what's actually wrong. And once
the mind is set, once the mind is
in the right place, the person is still
sick.
They're still sick, but when their mentality and
their emotions and their intentions, and their motivation
changes inside,
then they still If they die today, they
die healthy.
Because their mind and their heart is in
the right place.
Once their mind and heart is in the
right place, it's not like tomorrow they'll be
healthy.
But tomorrow, they'll be 0.1%
healthier. And the day after, they'll be 0.2%
healthier. And if they stay at it, they're
gonna see a 10% improvement in 10 years
and a 20% improvement in twin. They'll see
an improvement.
They'll see things changing, won't they?
Now think about the fact that the Prophet
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam compared the entire ummah
to a single body.
We want change
now.
At anything you change in the body immediately,
the body reacts to it.
But
any change you build bring into your body,
physically, emotionally, psychologically,
socially,
any change you bring that was planned and
built and developed stays.
It stays. And any change you try to
bring simultaneously collapses.
It's it's unnatural.
With that mentality, when the umma, when especially
the youth are frustrated, why are Muslims in
a position of weakness? We are 20%
or more of the population of the world.
Why are we so silent?
Why are we not heard? Why is it
that we cried about Philistine for 70 years?
Nobody was listening. And 1 girl on TikTok
from Wyoming
because she happens to be an American and
she happens to be white, just crying about
the atrocity and all of a sudden it's
a world issue.
Oh, they're talking. Oh, they're talking about it.
Now it matters. You we are talking about
it for a long time. Who's listening?
Why why are our voices
so mute,
so unworthy to be heard in the world?
And you can be frustrated about that and
cry about that and bang podiums about that,
but until
we decide that we acknowledge we're in a
position of sickness
and weakness, and it takes time and mindset
to build yourself to a position of strength.
If you're not strong enough to fight a
bully, and you're too skinny, and they're 2
feet taller than you, and they're much bigger
than you, then you better go train.
It's gonna take a while,
but you better be ready for that. You
better build yourself up. And that's the mentality
socially, economically,
spiritually, educationally
that the Muslim mind has to develop.
That you are the seeds of, especially the
young people sitting here. You're the seeds of
that. And the elders that are sitting here,
you especially like myself, those of us that
are above 40, we are now turning to
Allah saying, You Allah, empower me to be
grateful. You know what that means? Just like
Dawud alaihis salamu alayhi salam were putting money
or putting resources into building weapons,
these youth investing in them, building them, you
know, nurturing them,
even employing them, teaching them investment, teaching them
independence,
giving them vision. That becomes your responsibility.
That that's your gratitude. That's what you have
to share. May Allah make us a community
where the elders benefit the youth and the
youth benefit the elders. May Allah make us
a community that is truly inspired
by the principles of shukr that Allah has
taught us so beautifully in his book.
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