Omar Suleiman – Why Should You Care- Lecture
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the history and cultural significance of Islam, including its origins and cultural impact. They emphasize the importance of worship, religion, and religion in modern times and the insincerity of people. The speakers stress the importance of trusting oneself and shaping conversations with one's own children. The speakers also emphasize the importance of sincerity in protecting one's own well-being and shaping one's own lives. They stress the importance of showing up as Muslims to save lives and their universal morality.
AI: Summary ©
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu.
I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed
Satan, the accursed in the name of Allah,
the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of
the worlds.
No one is worthy of worship except against
the wrongdoers.
And the punishment is due to the righteous.
O Allah, bless and bless Your servant and
Messenger Muhammad ﷺ and his family and companions.
MashaAllah, the energy is so high in here.
I could feel the roof coming off of
this place.
Alhamdulillah.
May Allah bless you all.
May Allah accept it from all of you.
And may Allah accept from the volunteers here
at IKNA and those that organize this convention.
I want you on your way out to
thank every single person that you see that's
wearing a vest.
Everyone that's directing traffic.
Everyone that is operating any element of this.
Please say to them, jazakallahu khairah on the
way out, inshaAllah.
So I'm going to ask you all a
question.
And I'll come back to it inshaAllah ta
'ala because I wanted to frame the conclusion
of what has been a powerful session as
I was listening backstage with something very interesting.
How many of you have heard of Abu
Bakr al-Siddiq radiyallahu anhu?
Can you raise your hands?
All right, good.
I just want to make sure.
How many of you have heard of a
cousin of Abu Bakr by the name of
Abdullah ibn Jud'an?
Very few of you.
So again, how many of you have heard
of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq radiyallahu anhu?
Good.
His name was Abdullah ibn Uthman.
That's his actual name radiyallahu anhu.
And he had a cousin named Abdullah ibn
Jud'an that you may have never heard
of.
How many of you have heard of Umar
bin Khattab radiyallahu anhu?
How many of you have heard of Amir
ibn Hisham?
Who is he?
Abu Jahl.
Abu Jahl, more commonly known as Abu Jahl.
Now I want to put you in this
interesting situation.
And I'll bring it back to the theme
inshaAllah ta'ala in a moment.
I want you to imagine if you walked
into Mecca for hajj in the year 609.
When did the Prophet ﷺ receive revelation?
What year?
I know y'all are like, why is
he asking us all these questions?
610.
The hajj of the days of ignorance was
not like the hajj now.
The hajj now, which is its original form,
a celebration of the oneness of Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala and a commitment to full
submission to Him subhanahu wa ta'ala in
the way of our father Ibrahim ﷺ, was
almost exactly the opposite of what it was
meant to be.
The hajj which was supposed to be about
Allah became about everything but Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala.
The hajj which is supposed to erase distinctions
became all about distinctions.
The hajj which is supposed to be an
exercise of modesty became one of the lewdest
practices of all.
The irony is they still called it hajj.
They even had a picture of Ibrahim ﷺ
in the Kaaba.
They had a picture of Maryam ﷺ.
They still called it hajj.
But it literally served the opposite function.
So you walk there 609.
And I want to kind of paint a
picture of what you would see beyond the
obvious greatest transgression of idol worship.
You would see people that are being exploited
in real time even by those who are
supposed to be in a state of worship
of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
You would see complete *.
Because they would do hajj without clothes at
that time.
You would see disgusting claims and sloganeering of
tribalism.
And interestingly enough you'd also see great charity.
You'd see sadaqah.
And the people that would be calling to
their homes and boasting about their charity are
some of the same people that we scorn
today.
Abu Jahl, Amr ibn Hisham, would have been
known to you as one of the most
generous people in Mecca that day.
Inviting people to the corner of Banu Mahzum
of his tribe where we feed the people,
we take care of the pilgrims, and we
relish in the praise of that.
But when the Prophet ﷺ stood up and
called to la ilaha illallah, the real nature
of that man came out.
And so if you walked into Mecca in
613, the same man that might have been
making a public display of taking care of
a Sumayya or a Bilal was now torturing
them in public.
The same man that might have stood up
and given a lengthy speech about the importance
of unity, about the importance of keeping our
tribes together, and we are one hand as
Quraysh, was insulting the Prophet ﷺ and putting
down the sub-tribes and would come to
be the Fir'aun of this ummah, the
pharaoh of this ummah.
In a matter of a few years, his
reality came out.
The other man that I mentioned was Abdullah
ibn Jud'an, who was also a very
generous man.
The cousin of Abu Bakr as-Siddiq radiAllahu
ta'ala anhu.
And Abdullah ibn Uthman, who was Abu Bakr,
was very generous as well.
But Abdullah ibn Jud'an is a story
of a man who went from poverty to
prosperity very quick.
He was a very poor man who found
a bunch of treasures in the mountains and
became one of the wealthiest men in Arabia.
And he used to feed the people.
And he used to host in his lofty
mansion at the time, relatively speaking.
But he died without saying, La ilaha illallah
Muhammadun Rasulullah.
And Aisha radiAllahu anha asked the Prophet ﷺ,
Ya Rasulullah, Abdullah ibn Jud'an, kani yut
'imu ta'am wa yuqri'u dhaif.
The word should sound familiar to you in
Arabic because it's how Khadijah radiAllahu anha described
the Prophet ﷺ.
He used to feed the people and he
used to take care of the guests.
Will any of that benefit him on the
Day of Judgment?
And the Prophet ﷺ said, no.
Because not a day went by where the
man said, Rabbikhfir li khati'ati yawm ad
-din.
My Lord, forgive me for my sins on
the final day.
He never once repented.
He never made tawbah to Allah.
He never came back to his Lord.
Now there's a reason why I start off
with this framing.
You know, some time ago I gave a
khutbah on the vocabulary of a narcissist, qualities
of narcissism.
Ibn al-Qayyim rahimahullah calls it, ana li
'indi.
That these are the words that are ascribed
to the tyrants in the Qur'an, me,
myself and I.
That if you find that in your vocabulary
frequently, then that's a sign of a deeper
spiritual disease.
And if you think about the psychology of
a tyrant and you ask yourself when you
see a tyrant, how do they kill all
those children?
How do they inflict all sorts of cruelty
upon their people and still go to sleep
at night?
Why would you even do that to people?
And of course, we live in a day
and age, unfortunately, where tyrants are sanitized by
others when it becomes too politically costly to
maintain the tyrants and the status of a
tyrant.
And so to our Syrian brothers and sisters
that are here, we know what the criminal
Bashar al-Assad did to your people.
And even if he is welcomed back into
an arena of world leaders, your Lord does
not forget.
And we still have the conscience to still
look at a tyrant and say that's a
tyrant.
That's a person that killed their people.
That's a person that killed other people.
While other people buckle and shackle when they
see the criminal behavior of the apartheid state
of Israel to Palestine and all these so
-called progressives and people that are for human
rights suddenly can't say a word for our
brothers and sisters in Palestine but could sing
all day about everyone else.
We know what oppression looks like.
We know what tyranny looks like.
You know, when they talk about Palestine and
they say that they used to say a
land without a people for a people without
a land, that's because they didn't even regard
the people that were in that land as
real people.
But we were there and our Palestinian ancestors
were there and the people of Palestine will
continue to be there until the last day.
But I want you to think about the
psychology of when you think about people as
non-existent.
Does the tyrant hate the people that they
kill?
Does the narcissist hate the people that they
mistreat?
Or are they indifferent to those people?
They're indifferent because they see one thing and
worship one thing and they are sincere to
one pursuit and one pursuit alone and that's
power.
And anything that gets in the way of
my power is a discardable piece of trash.
And anyone or anything that can help me
reach my power, what I seek of power
is something that I'll consider to be useful
and beneficial.
But there's no sincerity to anything except for
the pursuit of power.
And I want to bring it back to
Abu Jahl.
I want to bring it back to Abdullah
ibn Jud'an even though there's a difference
between the two of them by the way
because ليسوا not all of them are the
same.
Why was Abu Jahl so generous to the
people?
Why was he so kind?
Why was he so charitable so that in
609 if he walked into Mecca he said,
wow, this man embodies the values of altruism
and charity and empathy and generosity and hospitality
and all of these great things.
Why was Abu Jahl like that?
Because Abu Jahl was about Abu Jahl.
That entire time was not about feeding the
people.
That entire time it was about Abu Jahl
being recognized as the one who fed the
people.
It wasn't about the way he loved to
make the traveler smile and give food to
the hungry.
It was about his ego needing to be
stroked in his position in society to be
told that Amir ibn Hisham, Abu al-Hakam,
the father of wisdom and see subhanallah how
Allah flipped it on him.
The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, مَنْ سَمَّعَ
سَمَّعَ اللَّهُ بِهِ وَمَنْ يُرَأْ يُرَأْ إِلَّهُ بِهِ
Whoever tries to make people hear of their
good, Allah will make people hear of their
evil.
Whoever tries to show off their good, Allah
will show off their evil.
Look how insincere he was and look what
Allah Azawajal did to him.
He worked that whole time to build up
a name of the father of wisdom and
he goes down in history as the father
of ignorance.
But it was never about feeding the people.
It was never about caring about the people.
It was about him the entire time.
His goal was to inflate his own sense
of importance.
Meaning Abu Jahl had no loyalty to any
cause, had no actual value system, had no
actual moral anchor.
All he cared about was himself.
And sometimes people can give off slogans.
They can say what you want to hear.
But at the end of the day, they're
not about you.
They're not trying to help you.
They don't care about you.
And for an innocent person, it's hard at
times to be able to understand someone who's
so insincere.
The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was known as
As-Sadiq Al-Ameen.
He was truthful, trustworthy, honorable.
We know he's for us Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.
We know he cares about us.
We know that even if we persecute him
in Mecca, even when they persecute him, there
is no person more trustworthy because the man
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is loyal to his principles.
He's not like Abu Jahl.
He's anchored in something else.
He's trustworthy.
He's truthful.
And you know, those same terms, Subhanallah, that
same noble trait, guess who else called themselves
Ameen?
Anyone know?
The devil himself.
The devil himself.
When he came to Adam Alayhis Salaam and
he told Adam Alayhis Salaam, look, I'm telling
you to eat from this tree.
And he said, إني لكم ناصح أمين I'm
an honest, sincere, trustworthy advisor to you.
I care about you.
I'm only telling you about this tree because
it's good for you.
And when Allah Azawajal asked Adam Alayhis Salaam,
how he fell for it?
How he disobeyed?
He said, ما ظننت أن أحد يقسم بالله
كذبة So I didn't think that people could
swear by the name of Allah and lie.
Adam Alayhis Salaam could not believe that Iblis
would say to him, والله, I'm for you.
I'm doing this for you.
This is all about you.
ما ظننت أن أحد يقسم بالله كذبة I
didn't think it was possible for someone to
use the name of Allah in vain because
Adam Alayhis Salaam was sincere.
Now why do I bring this all up
and what does this have to do with
the topic of faith, family, values?
There's a beautiful hadith of the Prophet Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam and it's one of the most
comprehensive hadith of our Messenger Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
قال الدين النصيحة وفي رواية إن الدين نصيحة
The religion is sincerity.
You want to know what the greatest value
system of Islam is?
That's supposed to transpire in every interaction that
you have with your Lord, with your family,
with your community, with your society.
It's نصيحة, it's sincerity.
With your brother or sister who you love
or your brother or your sister who's a
little rough with you, it's نصيحة.
It's a sense of sincerity, a sense of
sincere advice.
الدين النصيحة And we said to who, O
Messenger of Allah?
لمن يا رسول الله He said to Allah,
لله, ولي كتابه and to his book, ولي
رسوله and to his Messenger Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.
And then he mentioned Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam ولي
أمة المسلمين وعامتهم and to the leaders of
the Muslims and to every single one of
them.
It's sincerity that you wish well towards them,
that you're for them, you're not for yourself.
And sincerity looks different to every one of
those parties.
Sincerity to Allah is not like sincerity to
the people.
It's a different type of sincerity because it's
one that entails obedience as well.
But in that contract of sincerity, what that
means to everybody around you is that you
actually care about their well-being.
Your greatest value proposition as a Muslim to
every single person in your life is that
you actually want them to succeed.
And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam could look
at anybody in the eyes, his daughter Fatima
radiyallahu ta'ala anha, when she asked him
of something worldly.
And when he's talking to his uncles or
his aunts, or he's talking to the furthest
person of society, and then he calls out
to the most precious and beautiful person in
the world to him, Fatima az-Zahra radiyallahu
anha, and says to her, سَلِّي مِن مَالِي
Go ahead and ask me for my money,
whatever you want.
But I can't protect you on the day
of judgment.
You have to do this yourself.
When the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam called you
to Islam, it was clearly because he cared
about you.
It was clearly because he loved you.
What does sincerity look like to our families,
parents in particular?
When you want your kid to be religious,
is it so that you can put him
up as a trophy and say that, look,
I've got a kid that mashaAllah does this
and does this and does that.
And let me tell you something, when your
kid falls, do you say to them, you're
embarrassing us.
I don't want people to say this and
this and this and that.
They need to know from you that you
want them to be saved for them.
That you want them to have a place
in Al-Jannah, that you care about them.
And when you're able to reshape your conversation
with your own children, it changes the dynamic.
This is for you.
And even if they can't hear you at
that moment.
And by the way, I say that to
the children as well that don't see your
parents as your opponents or your enemies.
Your parents love you more than they love
themselves.
Parents, your kids have to hear that from
you.
That I want you to succeed.
I don't care if everybody else in the
world thinks you're a success or thinks you're
a failure.
I care about you meeting Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala as a success and not as
a failure.
That's to your family.
What's nasiha look like to your community?
To those that are around you?
That when you walk into the masjid, those
brothers and sisters that are around you, I
want you to be saved.
I want you to go to jannah.
What does sincerity look like to your society?
That you're not trying to score cheap political
points with everybody around you.
You're not trying to win a Twitter battle
in real life.
You actually care about the well-being of
people.
You want them to be saved in this
life and in the next.
And people have to know that when we
show up as Muslims, that we show up
for them, that we care about them.
And that starts with how we deal with
each other dear brothers and sisters.
If when you see your brother or your
sister fall, and your first instinct is to
laugh at them or to mock them, if
you see them utter statements that could compromise
their safety in the hereafter, or you see
them start to fall away from Islam, and
your first instinct is to chuckle about it
and sneer about it, and to make fun
of it, and to pass on that news,
examine your heart.
Because Allah might forgive them for their slip,
but not forgive you for your pride.
You have to go back and interrogate yourself
and say, am I nasih to that person,
or was it about me the entire time?
What about that person?
Am I sincere to my brother or sister?
You know when we talk about the different
diseases, social, moral diseases, a society that can't
define any set of coherent principles, that can't
define anything about what a human being is
supposed to be.
What's our value proposition when we come to
the table?
That we have a sincerity that leads us
to a level of consistency in how we
deal with the issues of society around us,
because ad-dinun nasiha.
Sincerity is there, that we want to save
people, that we want to help people.
And so what that translates into is a
consistent moral program.
Our morality is unlike the claims to morality
that other people have, because it's anchored in
a sincere belief in Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala that He defines morality, and that Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala entrusts us to go
out and to live that morality, to call
people to it, and to live it in
the most beautiful of ways in our own
lives, so that people see the difference between
what we claim and what we attach ourselves
to, and what other people attach themselves to.
And so you talk about the *, disease
of * in the world today.
As Muslims, we can step to the table
and we can say we care about the
person in front of the screen, and we
care about the person behind the scene.
And I'm sincere to wanting to help my
brother that's addicted to it, and sincere in
wanting to help those that are trafficked by
it.
I'm sincere to people in regards to their
dunya, and in regards to their akhira.
That's what we bring in terms of nasiha
to everything and everyone around us.
That's what the Prophet ﷺ was able to
anchor himself in.
That's why the Prophet ﷺ did not have
the moral blind spots.
And we as Muslims should not have the
moral blind spots of the political right or
the political left.
That's why the Prophet ﷺ gave us something
that is universal and that can apply to
all times.
That's what allows us to maintain the moral
high ground.
That our sense of salvation and wanting to
bring the people to Allah ﷻ is one
that seeks to save them in this life
and in the next.
And I'm going to end with this by
the way.
We have to change the way that we
see each other.
Let me tell you something.
Imam Siraj Wahad said something years ago, and
I've quoted him so many times.
I've forgotten how many times I've quoted him
on it.
When Imam Siraj sees other Muslims behaving like
buffoons to each other, treating other brothers and
sisters like enemies that they want to drag
down into hellfire.
As if you want to pull people into
jahannam the way shaitan wants to pull people
into jahannam.
And Imam Siraj said something that was so
profound.
He said, we're all on the same team.
You don't go and abuse your teammate.
You don't take your own out.
Your sincerity to each other as individuals, as
organizations, as efforts.
You're on the same team.
Addeenun nasiha.
Try to help your brother or your sister.
When you see your brother or your sister
falling, don't laugh, cry.
Don't speak about themselves speak to Allah about
them.
Make dua for them.
Don't tell others about how messed up they
are.
Call them and tell them, I want to
help you get out of this place that
you're in.
That's what's going to make you different on
the day of judgment.
That's what differentiates as-sadiq al-ameen from
the one who claimed to be nasiha al
-ameen.
Is an actual desire to save people.
We ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A
'la to save us and to rectify us
and to purify our hearts.
And we ask Allah to guide and to
rectify and to purify through us all of
those that are around us.
We ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A
'la to put in our hearts the love
of Allah and the Messenger Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
and the love of all that is beloved
to Allah and the hatred of all that
is hated to Allah.
Allahumma habbib ilayna al-iman wa zayyinhu fi
qulubina wa karrih ilayna al-kufra wa al
-fusuqa wa al-isyan wa ja'alna min
al-rashideen Allahumma ameen.
Jazakum Allah Khair Wassalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.