Suhaib Webb – This Is How I Teach Young Adults Enroll Your’s Now!
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Okay.
Can everybody hear me? Just making sure you
guys can still hear me.
Yeah. We can hear you. Awesome. Awesome.
So let's hear some some some responses from
some people. Like,
did anyone's responses blow anyone anyone away? Like,
anything you guys wanna share in particular
from what faith means? Like, you can either
share your own reflection,
or if you heard something from someone else,
also, I would love to hear that from
you guys.
So feel free to just, like, raise your
hand. So I see Zayd has his hand
up. Please, Zayd, go ahead.
Yeah.
So basically, what
what what faith means to me is, like,
having confidence in Allah.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Why do you say that? Why is
that important? Like, confident confidence is very important.
Like, it's a lot of challenges out there,
man. You know?
And sometimes if we're not confident in something,
we're not we won't be true to it,
you know? So it's like, that's a really
profound thing that you share. That's awesome, Zayd.
Who else wants to share any any reflections
they have on
what faith means to them
You can just raise your hand and also
feel free to type it in the chat
box.
For me, faith means believing in the unseen.
We believe in a level you can't see
him.
That's really nice, Alicia.
Why is that important?
It's like I trust
a lot
with
every
thing that I've got. Like
It's beautiful. I don't know.
That's that's that's that's powerful, though. Like, that's
that's a really, really great reflection. Thank you
for sharing. Amira, awesome. Those are great reflections.
Thank you, guys. What I want us to
do today is to think about faith and
its components.
And I I wanna share with you 2
things.
The first is
a verse from the Quran, which is, like,
really, really beautiful,
very, very important verse, in I think it's
here.
If you look at the 24th chapter
of 14th verse,
what this is gonna help you do the
14th chapter of the 24th verse, excuse me,
is really gonna help you see how your
how you can
grow your faith and treat your faith.
And also understand something very important, that faith
goes up and down.
Faith has seasons.
Right? Sometimes people get really sad and depressed
like, oh, man, my iman is down. That's
normal.
And sometimes we feel like we're in a
really good place. Oh, my faith is really
high. So what I want this verse to
do for you today is to help you
imagine,
like, if you were going to see what
faith looks like,
this is what it looks like. And this
is gonna allow you to start to, like,
to treat your faith and also evaluate your
faith.
So, Allah says
here in the
14th,
chapter of the Quran,
verse number,
24.
After
Which means
it's hard to translate this.
Have you not seen
how Allah
presents an example of faith?
And
here
means faith. It means
a
good word.
Right? Because
there's no god except Allah, and Muhammad is
the messenger of Allah
is encapsulates faith as we'll talk about in
the future. But here's what's important for you,
especially as a young person, man. Because you're
growing, you know. You're still growing.
And you're you're becoming something amazing.
Many of you wanna
heal a fractured world.
You know, you have great ambition.
But
on the way to your goal, you gotta
think about how you grow.
Most of the people I meet when I
do,
like college entrance stuff or work with students
I worked at Harvard before, as I told
people, and now I work at NYU.
NYU is amazing. We have a lot of
student Muslim students here. We have a halal
dining hall. So I hope all of you
will come to NYU inshallah.
But
one of the things I see with people
is, like, they they always look at the
end and not how they got there.
When I was memorizing the Quran, my teacher
told me,
imagine doing it backwards.
Like, imagine that you're already a half of
that you've already done it. And now walk
backwards.
And I was like, that's really hard to
do. Like, it's easy to project where you'll
be,
but it's hard to walk back and think
how you got there.
So this, the 14th chapter,
the chapter called Abraham Ibrahim
verse 24.
It says that faith is like a good
tree.
Right?
Its roots are strong.
And its branches,
shoot, everywhere.
Like, if you think about the infinite
numbers
of metaphors that this verse
hits on, it's, like, unbelievable, man.
And And we're gonna talk about a few
of them today.
But first is this verse is providing you
with the components
of faith.
The first component
is to have strong roots.
And what do you guys think roots are
a metaphor for here? He says, like, the
faith has roots.
Like, what is that a metaphor for? Who
who can chime in? There's no wrong answer.
Like, I'm not gonna be like, oh, you're
wrong. Get out of my class. You know?
You know? I'm not gonna, like,
go into history.
The soul.
Nice.
Holding it down.
I don't know.
This is nice.
Foundations of Islam like and prayer. Oh
Fatima is here.
Excellent. Excellent. Who else? What do you think
that the roots of your faith are?
Yeah. What what does it mean when it
says that the roots of the faith
are
are
firmly fixed.
Adam and Jannah,
what are the roots of faith?
History. Nice.
The history of what happened in Islam.
Nice. That that's definitely could be be a
part of it.
But let me help you.
Think about it in your personal context. What
about the 5 pillars of Islam?
Oh, that's a good suggestion.
That's a great that's a great answer.
So according to Ibn Abbas,
the roots are
your mind
and your heart.
Some some scholars said something amazing, man.
They said that your heart is the soil.
Right?
So like your heart your heart is is
is where the root settles,
and then the root itself is your intellect.
So what I learned,
right, is now gonna be rooted into my
heart.
And that's something that I wanna emphasize in
this class, man,
is a lot of times in religious studies,
we feel that we're not encouraged to think,
we're not encouraged to disagree, we're not encouraged
to engage. But don't you have to dig
to plant something so that it roots strong?
And doesn't digging sometimes demand a little adversity?
Demand a little work?
Demand
a process of effort?
So in this one verse, Allahu Akbar man,
in this one word, in this one verse,
the process of working on our faith is
encapsulated
very beautifully and remarkably in something that can
only be a Quranic.
And that is that the soil
is the heart. So I have to make
sure that I keep my heart pure. We
have a class next spring on purification of
the soul for you guys. It's amazing. Purification
of the soul for people between the ages
of 13 18.
Like, how do I work on my heart
when I'm 13 or 14?
Like, what are the things that can
can can bother me spiritually at that age?
Then once I've kind of cleaned out the
the the soil and made sure that it's
fertile, I began to to learn things that
plant ideas into that heart. That's what it
means.
And what do you think it means by
the branches?
The branches of your faith shoot to the
sky.
Like you can see, man, the Quran is
beautiful, man. Like,
wow.
You know, It's such beautiful imagery
that it starts with your heart, which is
your earth.
And also there is something very beautiful about
this because just as we have to work
not to pollute our heart,
we should also make sure that we're not
polluting the earth. There's a lesson in this
that's even deeper that we don't have time
to talk about.
But
the soil is here.
I told my daughter I have a 19
year old daughter, Inshallah. I wonder you guys
will meet her. I told her, your foundation
isn't here. Your foundation is right here. I
told her, what's that? She says, this is
a foundation. I was like, that's not this
is your foundation.
So this.
And you live in a world now,
people don't encourage you to think about your
soul, man.
TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat,
not necessarily worried about
this. It's all very shallow,
very existential.
So the Quran says, no, no, no, no,
no, no.
When we talk about faith, we talk about
your essence, your earth,
your
constitution. What makes you up as a person?
So you wanna ask yourself, what are my
resources?
And now you can understand why the prophet
said
people are like metal, like gold and silver.
Like what comes from here?
And then
what do I plant are the ideas? And
that's the centrality
of learning.
And learning religion and asking and engaging and
shoveling
and digging,
facing adversity.
And then my question is to you, what
does
its branches
its branches shoot to the heavens? What does
that mean?
The branches of that root
that is planted in that earth
that comes from faith
shoot to the heavens.
What are the branches? The branches are your
actions,
are the good that you bring to the
world.
The world around you needs fruit.
So one of the questions I'm gonna ask
you, one of the assignments I'm gonna give
you in the Google classroom
is what fruit do you wanna bring to
the world?
What is going to produce?
What is Zaria gonna produce?
What is Miriam and Elisha? What is Asher
gonna produce? What fruit are you gonna bring
to a world
that really is going through a difficult time?
That takes us to the last point.
And can everyone see the YouTube video right
now?
Can you guys see it? Yes.
Nice. Yes.
Is I want you to I want you
just to watch this. It's only 1 minute
long.
This guy, for 5 years,
used a camera
to time lapse film an acorn tree in
his backyard
for 5
years.
He must have a lot of free time
on his hands.
But watch this. It's really interesting because
the metaphor that Allah
has given us for faith
is a tree that's planted in healthy soil,
who its roots, knowledge are firm and strong,
it's disciplined,
and then it it brings fruit to the
world.
It brings fruit to the people.
It brings fruit in its own life.
So here we go.
There's no sound,
so
it's a busy dog.
So that was, like, for me, that was
very interesting because
did you notice that sometimes, like, the the
tree grew well and then sometimes, like, it
it didn't grow very strong,
then suddenly it kind of like sprouted back
up. Yeah. And then sometimes it was weak,
and then sometimes it was strong.
That is
really a perfect example of faith.
Faith is very similar, and that's the last
thing that I want you to understand about
the components of faith. We said the the
first component of the faith is the intellect,
what you learn, what you study, what you
engage. That's the importance of the prophets. That's
the importance of the Quran. The primary role
of Quran
and prophets is to teach.
Allah says about the prophet
He's to teach them. The Quran
teaches.
And I plant knowledge after I think about
it, and I ponder it, and I engage,
I look at the world around me.
I allow myself to
to then grow. Right? And let me turn
off my my browser here.
And root myself in that knowledge.
The second thing is, after that is that
the fruit that you bring to the world
around you, Inshallah.
So dream big, man.
And then the third thing is the seasons.
It's 4 components. Sorry. That not
I can't have like, my faith is not
gonna be strong all the time. You're a
human being. And sometimes I know we hear
from our parents, even maybe we've heard from
religious teachers, like, you have to be the
perfect Muslim. No. You don't. You have to
be a Muslim
who strives,
who shovels,
who digs.
And then the last thing is that tree
didn't grow in one day.
And I want you to remember this. If
there's anything you remember from this this first
session together,
outside of the components of faith that we've
covered,
is that
Islam
is a process.
Faith is a process.
Everything in life around you is a process.
So you can't expect
to suddenly, oh, no. My my my faith
is so high. I'm the best Muslim in
the world.
No. No. No. Look at it as a
process. So what we'll do Insha'Allah, quickly I'm
gonna review what we covered and we'll take
any of your questions. I see a few
hands up. Number 1, we talked about some
of the house cleaning items that we need
to be aware of for the class. Right?
So on things that we wanna know.
Then number 2, we talked
about faith.
And next week, I wanna talk about the
meaning of faith. It's actually from a word,
which means
security. And then we talked about the components
of faith based on the 14th
24th verse of the 14th chapter of the
Quran.
Have you ever thought about how Allah sets
forth the example of faith? That's That's like
a good
word.
Right? Whose foundation is earth.
Right? Its earth is pure. Its foundations are
rooted and its branches are extending.
And then we talked about added to that
is that faith takes time. It's a process.
And that faith is not
that faith is not, like, always going to
be high or low. Right? It's gonna go
up in town. And we're gonna talk about
how to treat that through this class. And
one of the most important things we can
do is learn and engage. We're gonna stop
now. We have a few minutes left. If
you have any questions,
we'll be happy to to take those questions.
If
not