Omar Suleiman – Real Life Inspirational Stories of Refugees

			Oh
		

			work
		

			it's an I want to live in a castle
		

			Spinarak man, Rahim and him Did you know he'll be datamine will Salatu was Salam o Allah O Suta
hidden kitty Marta only he will so he will sell him to * cathedra.
		

			First of all, I hope you caught what Dr. Dahlia Fahey said that this has to be the birth of a new
anti war movement. And I want to emphasize on the onset before we talk about the humanitarianism
that's required and all of us taking care of refugees, and being there in the support of the Syrians
who are now facing the greatest humanitarian disaster that we will probably know in our times, as
well as the Palestinian refugees that have been displaced now, for over six decades, we have to
start forcing our government and forcing policy around the world so that more refugees are not
created. And that we're able to make a way out for these people so that they don't continue to live
		

			in diaspora. So when we talk about them as human beings that require our love and our compassion,
one thing that I emphasize to those youth on that trip is that they expect you to be their voice.
They don't just expect you to send charity, they don't just expect you to go there and and interact
with them. And although that's wonderful,
		

			allow them to feel human again and have some sort of outlet for their grief and for their pain.
		

			They expect you to be their voice, they expect you to tell their story for them, to tell the world
about them. And you have this seemingly endless influx of refugees into the deserts of Jordan, into
Turkey, internally displaced in Syria running from airstrike to airstrike and looking for refuge in
any part of the world and willing to put their lives on the line to escape the misery that they are
in.
		

			I want you to imagine what goes through the minds of a parents, as they board a boat, knowing that
there is a great chance that they're not going to make it to any country shore, and that their
children may wash up on a beach resort in Turkey, or in Greece, I want you to imagine what goes
through the minds of a mother and a child who have lost the father figure in a home and do not know
whether he is dead or alive and have not seen him for five, six years, and are literally living for
the purpose of living
		

			in these refugee camps.
		

			Your brothers and sisters, I want to share with you all some of the reflections that I had from
this, these last two trips, actually and Hamdulillah. And I encourage you by the way to try to also
take a trip out there. I know Helping Hand is organizing another youth for Jordan trip this coming
summer in sha Allah Allah to try to interact with these people. And not only that, but to really
look for the Syrian refugees that are in your own localities. A lot of times when we talk about the
Syrian refugees, and what can you do for Syria, we forget that there's a piece of Syria in Baltimore
and a piece of Syria and Dallas and a piece of Syria, in Houston and all over the country. There are
		

			clusters of Syrian refugees that are sitting in their apartment complexes without furniture and
without any guidance as to how they should proceed with the rest of their lives that have no social
structure, except for maybe a church or a charitable organization that brings them in once a week or
once a month that do not know how to operate a cell phone in this country that don't know how to pay
bills or apply for jobs. They're in your cities as well. They're right here and interacting with
them is of crucial importance. And the first reflection that I'll share with you is actually one
where the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam spoke about guidance and how he felt overwhelmed by
		

			his mission. He said sallallahu alayhi wa sallam about the people that I am like a man standing in
front of a fire that is stopping a bunch of fireflies or bugs trying to jump into the fire. And the
profit slice on said I'm grabbing you by your waist cloths. I'm grabbing you by your belts trying to
stop you from that fire which will harm you. And he said salaallah Hardy was set them to describe
his despair at the fact that he could not save everyone that you're fleeing from my hands. I grab
one group of you and then another group of you gets past me. I grabbed this person but their parents
escaped me I grabbed this parent this person but their children escaped me. And I thought about that
		

			numerous times as we were on the border of Syria.
		

			That when we deliver these trailer homes and when we are able to aid 100 or 200 Refugees
		

			Immediately the Shavon comes in whispers to you and says, What about the other 3 million?
		

			You can't reach them.
		

			And I swear to you that there are multiple moments where you just feel like sitting down and crying
and not doing anything anymore. Because you feel like you can't rescue them all. So what's the point
of even trying, and you have to remind yourself over and over again, that Allah will not ask you
about the 2.8 or 2.9 million that you could not directly help, he will ask you about the 100 or 200,
or 300 or 400, that you could, Allah might not ask you on the day of judgment about a person who you
could not help in policy or with aid or with humanitarian relief. But he will ask you about your
neighbors and those that are around the corner from you. And whether or not you even gave them your
		

			voice. And it's so easy to just give up and say, why even try? What's the point.
		

			And I'll tell you a thought that came to my mind. Just as when the messenger sallallahu alayhi wa
sallam speaks about this heavy burden of trying to save these people in the spiritual sense. He also
knew salAllahu alayhi wasallam, that perhaps one of those that he caught by the waist cloth would
rise up to also assist him and saving others that are falling into the fire.
		

			And I thought to myself, maybe just maybe by saving a few, by giving shelter to a few, those few
will have the accommodations necessary required for them to be able to also be in a capacity of
being caregivers, to everyone else. You see the beauty of people coming together around the shared
amount of resources.
		

			The last story is not just the refugees that some of the breadwinners that live on the outskirts
that are next to those refugee camps, that will wire their electricity to the refugee camps as well.
So that those people can also have electricity, even if they can bring them all into their homes.
The Untold Story of those refugee camps is the refugee that has decided that they will somehow
overcome those conditions, and that they will be the cause for the relief of their people who are
also in those conditions. That child that determined to get an education, one of the most fantastic,
one of the most phenomenal human beings that I met in the refugee camp was a school teacher from
		

			Syria.
		

			And she decided to turn her tent into a classroom.
		

			And she would go and she would bring all of the children from that camp and continue to teach them
		

			even though the assessment is bleak, and it seems like there is no end in sight to this. Some of
them know that one day in sha Allah Tada, they will overcome those seemingly insurmountable
obstacles, to be a source of relief not just to themselves and their families and their people, but
to others that will take their time, their turn in this genocidal cycle of history that we have
today, especially in the under the pretext of modern warfare.
		

			They know.
		

			And I want you to understand something dear brothers and sisters, while people in this country push
the narrative that those refugees are a source of fear. You have to push back with the narrative
that those refugees are, in fact the source of inspiration,
		

			that they have stories that can inspire entire generations, and they are people that we should look
to for help as well. Because our inability to recognize their humanity is a sign of a lack of
humanity on our part. It means that we lack that humanity. And these ideals that we strive to hold
true
		

			of justice and freedom cannot only be sought when it's politically convenient to do so.
		

			When the President floats a theology, in which suddenly these children are children of God, when
they were not children of God, when we rejected them from our borders, we have to push back on that
hypocrisy, and a reform of policy that continues to create more neglected refugees that are only
rescued or only sought when it's in the benefit and the interest of world powers that continue to
perpetuate the vicious cycle that leaves them in despair. We have to push back against it. And we
have to raise their stories. When you look at those refugees you don't see other children you see
your own children. When you see them through the screen, I want you to understand that though their
		

			eyes may be open, as we saw with the young boy Imran in the back of an ambulance, covered in ash.
		

			Not knowing what has happened. Looking around with this blank stare. When you look at Enron's face,
you see death.
		

			You see this, this
		

			you see this soul, this child, this child soul, that should have the same opportunities that our
kids have
		

			to be able to love life and to be happy and to wake up every morning and have loving parents that
take them to school, to know that they will come home to a shelter, where they will have food on the
table. And not only that, more than anything else a future
		

			that they will have their choice of what education they want to pursue, what career they want to
pursue, for the sake of their communities and for the sake of humanity. When we raise our children,
we're not just providing them food and shelter. We're giving them hope of a future. Imagine waking
up in these tents. And knowing that as you wake up, the only goal that you have for that day is to
make it another day.
		

			The only goal that you have is to continue to live and life has become just for the purpose of life.
		

			And as I was speaking with these refugees one by one,
		

			as they're slowly meeting their death, actually remember the statement from Maya Angelou when Maya
Angelou said that there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.
		

			The way that these young people, these young children and these women who are now widows wanted to
be able to have someone to tell their story to the validation that they felt in the presence of
people from a faraway land, just because they had someone else to tell their story to
		

			and the way they depended on us to then bring their story back to these shores. A country that has
deemed them to barbaric to accept so that they can tell their own stories here.
		

			That told me something. And I remembered our messenger sallallahu alayhi wa sallam when he was a
refugee. And I remembered Hasani his salaam when he was a refugee and Musa alayhis salam when he was
a refugee, and the companions of the Prophet sly some as they entered into Medina and Abu Bakr
Siddiq, Allah, the Allah Tada. I know when he got to Medina, he started to author these poems about
death, that what's left after Medina, except for death, everyone got sick because it wasn't home
because they lack stability. And you know Allah subhanaw taala likens
		

			being a refugee in the Quran to death when Allah subhanaw taala says in Surah Nisa, Willow Anna
Khattab now I am an ecology woman, Dr. An Ecto and Fusa calm our crew, Jerome and Dr. Rocha me in
the article when Allah subhanaw taala says that and had we written upon them to kill yourselves with
Raju min dare come or leave your homes. Allah likens a person being forced to leave their home to
death. Why? Because not having any prospects in this world, not having anything to look forward to
not having the stability
		

			of a country and a homeland. And a place where you can build yourself and foster your own
development and the development of your children
		

			is practically death.
		

			Dear brothers and sisters, I want you to look deeply right now, especially those of you who are
young enough to craft out your career goals. As you now pursue your career. Will you pursue your
career with the intention of helping those people the use of Amazon may Allah have mercy on them our
three winners as they pursued their careers in dentistry, they pursued it with the intention
		

			of being able to provide dental care for those Syrian refugees. Those of you that are pursuing
journalism or that are thinking of pursuing journalism do you have in your mind and your heart and
your intention that you are doing so so that you could tell their stories?
		

			Those of you that are pursuing education
		

			do you have in your mind and in your heart that you want to be able to provide educational
programming for those children that are now eight nine years old and cannot read because they have
no means of learning how to read in those refugee camps.
		

			As you look to your career, as you craft out your future, don't forget that you are not just
responsible for your future, but you're responsible for their future as well. What struck me most
when I was there, dear brothers and sisters
		

			As I listened to these untold stories previously untold stories of people that had been dying,
		

			to let others know what they had been through,
		

			what I heard over and over again, was that I did not expect this to happen.
		

			I'm not one brother by the name of it. Ali is a 52 year old man whose wife was killed in their
strike.
		

			And who has seven children, two of them were killed in an airstrike.
		

			So he was in that refugee camp with five kids. His oldest daughter is 19 years old. Before the
airstrikes struck them, they were preparing for her wedding.
		

			Think about that.
		

			The way that this rapidly changed for them, they are not a people who thought that they would one
day be refugees. They are a people who had hopes and dreams for themselves and for their children,
just as we have hopes and dreams for our own children. They knew that they had something ahead of
them. And now they have that uncertainty, and we have to be there to provide that certainty for
them. I wrote about Shahadat, that young girl, whose birthday is the same day as my daughter may.
		

			And when I hugged her as I was leaving, and I could see I could smell the stench of her hair because
they don't have access to showers. Some of these children have lice. As they open their mouths, you
can see all of the decay in their teeth. But Subhanallah the most beautiful smiles that you will
ever see.
		

			The most beautiful smiles that you will ever see. Because their smiles of resistance.
		

			Their smiles of people that have not given up on the hope that one day they too will be able to
live. The question is, have we given up on providing them that opportunity, no matter how desperate
the situation gets, no matter how hopeless it seems for our brothers and sisters in Syria, know that
if you are able to save one life, it is as if you have saved the life of mankind. Know that if you
are able to provide an opportunity to one child who thought that they did not have that opportunity.
It's as if you provided an opportunity to all of the children of the world, an imam in order to be
Rahim Allah said and one of the benefits of that is that he who saves a life it is as if he has
		

			saved the life of all of mankind is that perhaps through saving that one person's life, they will
then dedicate themselves to saving the lives of others. And they will then dedicate themselves to
saving the lives of others, we have to rediscover our humanitarian tradition in Islam, where we
don't just feel humanly obliged to these people, we feel spiritually obliged to these people. We
feel like our religion calls us to affirm their humanity in the face of the animals that run our
government and the governments around the world and continue to deny them a dignified existence, we
push back, we resist by continuing to care about them. Because slowly, slowly, we will lose stamina.
		

			And just like the Palestinians, who still live in diaspora, who still live in refugee camps
neglected, now over six decades, and people have moved on because of fatigue, to different
conflicts, the Syrians are now at risk of having the same thing done to them. But we push back on
the we resist when we send our children to go and serve those Syrian refugees in Jordan or in
Turkey, or in Lebanon, or here in Baltimore, or wherever it is that you came from. We resist the
notion that people's humanity expires after a decade of having get denied by a dictator. We resist
the narrative that their children have less of a right to live dignified than our own children. We
		

			resist the narrative that just because the media wants us to focus on a bad hair day of a celebrity,
that's a millionaire. Instead of these people that don't have access to basic hygienic products. We
reject the narrative that that person's hair is more important than a million lives that are living
in camps in Jordan, we reject it.
		

			And I remind you the next time as you're watching the images on TV, and as you're seeing these
refugees and in sha Allah to Allah as you are experiencing and encountering these refugees in flush,
I remind you of the image of the Prophet slice, I'm trying to grab people by the waist cloth. That's
all we're trying to do. Trying to grab as many as we can. To rescue not just those people but to
rescue the narrative of their people collectively. May Allah subhanaw taala Give victory to our
brothers and sisters in a sham. May Allah give
		

			Victory to our brothers and sisters that are oppressed all over the world. May Allah subhanaw taala
uplift them through us. May Allah not allow them to be a cause of punishment for us on the Day of
Judgment due to our ignoring them. May Allah subhanaw taala guide our hearts to compassion and mercy
and allow us to be channels of His mercy to those people to Zakouma located on the Santa Monica
Mountains.