Rania Awaad – The Prophetic Way of Dealing with Hardship
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
When we talk about difficulty, people think, well
how is ease with difficulty?
Because it's not after difficulty comes ease, it's
literally what?
Ma'a.
It's with.
Literally tucked into the difficulty is your ease.
But sometimes you can't see it right away.
And sometimes that ease isn't the thing itself,
but rather circumstances around it.
People, individuals, resources.
Just the ability to deal with something heavy
emotionally.
All of these are forms of yusra.
Right?
And so look at the Prophet ﷺ in
this year of prolonged sadness and difficulty.
What happens after the death of the uncle
and in the backdrop of this economic boycott,
the Prophet ﷺ says, well, I have distant
family that's in Ta'if.
I no longer have protection of Quraish.
And they're not going to be listening to
me.
The people that are, you know, the important
people of Quraish are no longer listening to
me.
So why don't I try another set of
distant family members and another tribe altogether?
Maybe they'll listen.
So he literally walks.
And here you have the Prophet ﷺ head
over there and he starts his da'wah.
He starts to call people to Islam.
He's got very specific, the heads of the
tribe that he wants to reach one by
one.
And he goes to them one by one.
You know what they say to him?
One person says to him, what?
Your Allah couldn't find someone better than you
to send us?
Someone else says, if you really are the
Prophet, then I'll be cursed.
Right?
The next person says, don't even try to
talk to me.
Basically, each one of them kicks him out.
Each one of them in turn kicks him
out.
And so he decides, despite all of this
pain, right?
Of people being very humiliating him.
He decides to stay in thought for a
little bit longer.
Why?
He says, well, let me give the da
'wah to the common people.
Right?
Their leaders don't want to listen.
Maybe the commoners will listen.
And then they started to actually be interested
in what is this message of Islam?
Do you know what happens next?
The leaders get wind of the fact that
the people are getting interested in Islam.
So what do they do?
They literally drive him out of thought.
And they literally pick up stones and pelt
him with this so much so that literally
he starts to bleed.
It said that his heels were so *
from this incident of so many stones hitting
him that his foot is sticking into his
sandal because of the blood.
And you know, when you're when you're targeted
like this, you're so humiliated like this.
He said, I lost track of where I
was.
Can you imagine?
You're being driven out and being pelted and
pelted with stones and you're bleeding and you're
kind of a little bit confused where you
are.
He said, I did not even know where
I was until he got to a specific
orchard.
SubhanAllah, where is the yusra tucked into the
usr here?
He's sitting in an orchard and the orchard
belongs to people who are technically enemies, right?
But he's sitting there and the people see
him and he's bleeding.
And so they said they sent their servant
to him and they said, give him some
grapes from the orchard.
I never told you orchards, right?
So when he's offered these grapes, he says,
bismillah.
And the servant who listens to this, he
says, who taught you to say this?
And he says, I'm a prophet of God.
I'm taught this the way Allah has taught
the prophets.
And so he says, the servant says, I
haven't heard anyone in these words.
And he said, I too, I'm a descendant
of Sayyidina Yunus and I'm a prophet just
like the prophet Yunus and we are both
given a message from the same God.
Do you know that that servant right there
took his shahada and became a Muslim?
People don't know some of the little finer
details, but that was, he hoped for Ta
'if to become Muslim, but he had this
one person and he said with this one
person, it was the weight of that entire
current city.
And you think about had that whole city
been annihilated, there wouldn't have been those believers
today.
But let's go back to our story.
Here's the prophet.
He's had what?
Multiple losses, one after another.
Why do I share this?
Because when you think about the discussion on
mental health and you think about person's well
-being and mental wellness, we turn first to
the prophet.
What is it that we don't see?
We don't see somebody turning after some difficulty,
turning against Allah.
We don't see somebody saying, why me?
We don't see somebody saying, I can do
this completely on my own.
That last point is very important.
And he had his community and he went
and tried to seek out support from the
leaders who wouldn't listen to him, but he
was trying because he knew that you don't
do this alone.
See, today we have a little bit of
a trouble with this.
A lot of us believe that we can
do things completely on our own.
We think that we need to be self
-sufficient.
We need to be able to wipe away
our own tears.
And in fact, we maybe shouldn't even have
tears in the first place.
And that's just simply not the message of
our prophet or the prophets of the Quran.