Tom Facchine – Allah Will Ask- What Did You Do With Your Freedom
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AI: Transcript ©
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
Welcome back to what used to be Imam
Tom live.
We've got big news, and it's going to
be good news, hopefully, insha'Allah ta'ala,
that the live stream will be coming to
an end.
Well, wait a second.
How can that be good news?
It's going to be good news because it's
going to make way for two or three
new programs that we're going to be doing
through Yaqeen Institute, hosted by myself.
So stay tuned for that.
You can continue to expect the weekly program
being uploaded.
Unfortunately, I will miss interacting with you all,
and we had a really nice run.
But hopefully, insha'Allah, this is paving the
way for something greater in the near future.
Now, when it comes to the past week,
we've had certainly, subhanAllah, a lot of stuff
going on.
All of our hearts are bleeding because we've
seen the attack on those hospitals yet again.
And subhanAllah, you know, some people have said
that this is a war on children, and
we could also say that the last year,
the last 12 months, it's been a war
on hospitals.
How many hospitals have been bombed?
How many times have we seen people evacuated
from hospitals in wheelchairs or being carried out,
hooked up to IVs, you name it.
Things that I think for many of us,
we never ever could have imagined seeing.
And so, some of the horrifying, horrifying images
that came out of this past week's hospital
attack on Al-Aqsa and Shifa Hospital were
people being engulfed in flames.
As they're hooked up to IVs, as they're
still on their hospital beds.
Truly, truly horrifying images.
And someone pointed out to me, subhanAllah, a
connection that hadn't occurred to me, which is
that it's almost as if we're being given
a preview into hellfire.
Not to say, of course, that the people
who died in this sort of tragic way
are in heaven, you know, martyrs, insha'Allah.
But that, when we think normally, you walk
around and you see people and you might
say, okay, this person, they have their private
lives and I don't want to sort of
interfere or anything.
I don't want to be noticed as a
Muslim or I don't want to explain Islam
to them and sort of hide your Islam
away.
But when you see people actually burning up,
it reminds you of the hellfire.
And it makes you both scared for yourself
and it makes you also, hopefully, more empathetic
to other people and trying to represent Islam
in the best possible way to minimize the
amount of people that end up in that
particular way in the hereafter.
Shaban was the name of one of the
martyrs.
The video of him was particularly gruesome.
And it's important that we remember their names
and their stories.
And he was a hafidh of the Qur
'an.
He was somebody who has avoided and dodged
many near-death experiences in the last 12
months and somebody beloved to his family and
his community.
And we're happy that Shaban has achieved martyrdom.
But, of course, we are aggrieved by the
criminal circumstances in which he was martyred.
And so we're praying for the martyrs of
Gaza and Palestine and for the people in
general.
In other news, we had Israel, not surprising,
attack UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
And this is something that has become another
regular occurrence, just like it is a war
against children.
It is a war against hospitals.
There's also a war against international law.
287 aid workers have been killed since the
conflict began on October 7th, 2023.
This in total includes 205 UNRWA staff members,
marking the largest recorded loss of UN personnel
in a single conflict.
And most of these have taken place in
Gaza.
In other news, we've got that the U
.S. has both simultaneously tried to say that,
this was leaked by the Biden administration, that
it has given Israel 30 days to sort
of ensure that humanitarian concerns are going to
be honored.
At the same time, they have deployed U
.S. soldiers to the Middle East and given
a THAAD missile defense system to Israel.
The troops that are going to be there
are going to help operate the system, and
that is in response to the escalating missile
attacks from Iran and also from Hezbollah in
Lebanon.
And so this is sort of another sort
of technique that we've seen from the incumbent
administration of sort of saying one thing and
then doing something else entirely.
Here at home, we've had a tragic incident
in Detroit, where a seven-year-old girl
named Saeeda Meshra had her throat slashed by
a man in a Detroit park in what
is a brutal and infuriating attack committed by
someone who was a 73-year-old man
identified as Gary Lansky, who did it with
a pocketknife.
Now, somehow this is not being charged as
a hate crime.
Lansky is being charged with assault with intent
to murder and felonious assault, but is not
facing hate crime charges despite the political context
and despite the potential symbolic significance of what's
going on.
Obviously, this has sparked outrage in the community.
No secret to anybody, Detroit is the home
of one of the largest Arab American communities
in the country.
It looks fishy.
Let's just put it that way.
So, we ask Allah to give patience to
the family.
Finally, one of the clips that have gone
viral in the past week, we had Mehdi
Hassan giving sort of a plea to the
Muslim community.
What I want to address here is one
of the sort of the secularist claims that
Mehdi made in his video.
The trope or the sort of suggestion that
Mehdi was making that faith has nothing to
do with politics, that the Imams are abusing
their station or that they are weaponizing Islam,
that they're blackmailing people spiritually into doing this
or that political action.
And this is a very, very problematic framing
because as we know in Islam, we don't
have this bifurcation between our private sort of
secularized faith and our public secular existence.
That we see our faith informs everything that
we do and that your political decisions are
also moral decisions.
They have moral dimensions to them, that how
you vote, how you spend your money, the
policies that you support one way or another,
you could face consequences in the afterlife because
of it.
You will stand in front of Allah and
you will be asked, what did you do
with your opportunities?
What did you do with your vote?
What did you do with your freedom?
What did you do with your ability to
speak?
And if you did something that contributed to
the suffering of another person or spread corruption
on earth or spread harm or spread oppression,
then that is something that you will be
spiritually liable for unless Allah chooses to forgive
it.
And so to attempt to artificially separate these
two things is a very, very surprising, but
also, I guess, non-surprising tack.
We hope that we do not leave our
faith at the door when we walk into
the polling station on November 5th.
We hope that our faith guides our actions,
all of our actions, from something as simple
as how we use the bathroom to how
we vote to how we organize politically.
Remember that this is something that the companions
were proud of when they were asked by
the Quraysh in a sort of mocking way.
It's like you even follow instructions about how
to use the bathroom.
And they said, yes, proudly, proudly.
We have guidance for how to use the
bathroom and clean ourselves.
Islam is something that touches every aspect of
your life.
It's not just for the mosque.
And now it's time for our next segment,
which is Tafsir.
Moving on to Surah Al-Kahfirun.
And the question is, what is the unique
word that appears in Surah Al-Kahfirun that
does not appear elsewhere in the Qur'an?
Remember, this is one of the linguistic miracles
of the Qur'an.
114 chapters.
Every single chapter has at least one word
that does not exist in any other chapter.
And in Surah Al-Kahfirun, the word is
عَبَدْتُمْ Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, when he's
telling the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam what
to say, saying, say to the people who
are fighting you, the people who have rejected
and denied faith, that I don't worship what
you worship, and you don't worship what I
worship.
And I am not a worshipper.
So we have, we're going to talk about
that in a second.
And I do not worship what you have
worshipped.
So عَبَدْتُمْ, which is a past tense verb
for the second person plural, is a word
that does not exist anywhere else in the
Qur'an outside of Surah Al-Kahfirun.
It's actually very important whether Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala is talking about something using verbs
or nouns.
That in Arabic, a verb indicates something that
is a repetitive action that takes renewal.
Okay?
So when Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says,
for example, يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا He is
saying, Oh, you people who have believed, literally,
in the past you have believed.
He's putting it in tense of a verb
because that belief requires continual maintenance and upkeep,
that you could change your mind, you could
stop doing it.
Right?
And so it's almost a subtle implicit reminder
to renew your faith, to keep doing the
things that make you somebody who is believer.
Now, on the flip side, if Allah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala uses a noun, that this
indicates not a verb that is more transient
that requires continuous upkeep, but rather a more
essential state.
So when Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says
in this ayah, يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ كَافِرُونَ He
didn't say, يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ كَافِرُوا He said,
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ كَافِرُونَ Oh, you who have,
basically, you have doubled down, your essence is
to deny.
Like you have made it your thing, it's
not going to change.
Right?
That is one of the subtleties of the
word choice that Allah uses here.
This surah is addressing the people who have,
who denied Islam, that he's using the noun,
which indicates that it is something that is
essential to them.
Something that it's not like they're on the
fence.
It's not like they want to know more.
It's not like they have some doubts that
they want clarification for.
No, their determined position is one of denial.
And we've seen this elsewhere in the Quran,
when Allah says that there are certain people
that if you were to show them every
single ayah, every single miracle, respond to every
single thing, they would still not believe.
So their doubts or their questions are not
genuine good faith doubts or questions, that they
are rather excuses.
This is the type of person that we're
talking about, right?
And this is the type of person Allah
references in Surah Al-Baqarah, he says, سَوَاءً
عَلَيْكُمْ أَنظَلْتَهُمْ أَمْلَمْ تُنذِرْهُمْ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ That it's
the same whether you warn them or not.
This is the type of person that we
use the ism for, that we use the
noun for, the type of person who is
essentially and fundamentally and through and through, they
have resolved upon denying, no matter what.
What should we say to them?
لَا أَعْبُدُ مَا تَعْبُدُونَ I am not worshiping.
It uses a verb there.
مَا تَعْبُدُونَ What you are worshiping.
Okay.
So you are worshiping at that time, idols,
superstitions, uh, ancestors.
I am not worshiping those things.
وَلَا أَنْتُمْ عَابِدُونَ مَا عَبُدُونَ Allah switches to
the noun.
Okay.
It's very interesting.
It says, and you all are not worshipers
of what I worship.
So again, Allah uses the noun here because
he's not talking about just a transient state
that some of them are going to eventually
discover Islam.
No, it's like, you are not worshipers that
you guys have no interest whatsoever in worshiping
the creator, the Lord of all worlds, the
one who controls everything, what I am worshiping.
وَلَا أَنَا عَابِدُونَ مَا عَبَدْتُمْ And I am
not a worshiper of what you have worshiped.
So again, the same flip, Allah uses the
ism, he uses the noun to indicate to
the Prophet ﷺ that essentially, fundamentally, continuously that
he is not a worshiper of that which
they worship, whether it's their desires, whether it's
their ego, whether it's money, whether it's whatever,
everything that they've been worshiping, the Prophet ﷺ
has never been and is not, essentially is
not a worshiper of those things.
وَلَا أَنْتُمْ عَابِدُونَ مَا عَبُدُونَ Allah repeats, and
you all are not worshipers of what I
am worshiping.
And then Allah finishes the surah by saying,
لَكُمْ دِينُكُمْ وَلِيَ الدِّينُ And to you, your
way, and to me, mine, or to you,
your path, or to me, mine, or to
you, your religion, and to me, mine.
Now, basically that this was in response to
some of the attempts to muddy the waters,
right?
There were some people of the Quraysh at
the time that would say to the Prophet
Muhammad ﷺ, Hey, look, why don't we split
the difference here?
You worship our idols for one year and
we'll worship Allah exclusively for one year, and
we'll go back and forth.
And so the Prophet ﷺ wanted to keep
the Furqan clear.
He wanted to keep the distinction between these
two things clear, that you can't muddy the
waters between truth and falsehood.
You can't blur the lines, that you have
to make it distinct.
That my way is not your way.
You guys are worshiping, and as we see
elsewhere in the Qur'an, Allah exposes them
for being hypocritical.
They're using these idols and they're using these
superstitions, not necessarily because they genuinely believe in
them, but for their own sort of maslaha
or benefit.
Remember, if you've ever asked your parents for
something, okay, you ask your one parent, if
you can have some sweets and they say,
no, what do you do?
You go to the second parent and ask
the same question, right?
This is the way that they were using
their idols, that they were using the idols
as a ruse to do whatever it was
that they wanted to do anyway.
And then they would feel bad about things.
And so they would make extra rules and
superstitions that they had to follow.
And this sort of nature, it was not
good faith.
It was motivated by ulterior motives.
And so that type of practice cannot mix
whatsoever for a second with true, genuine submission.
And remember that Islam means submission to Allah's
will and decree.
That means that the attitude of a Muslim
is that no matter what comes down from
Allah and the Qur'an or the Prophet
ﷺ, we agree, we submit, we'll do it.
We're not going to try to find loopholes.
We're not going to try to find workarounds.
We're not going to try to misinterpret or
play with it or whatever.
Our disposition towards Allah's guidance is one of
submission, which is completely different from the attitude,
orientation, and disposition of the people that were
habitual deniers.
And now turning to our personal development section,
we've been completing this book together, Atomic Habits
by James Clear.
We've been benefiting from the four fundamental rules
of building good habits, which make it obvious,
make it attractive, make it easy, and make
it rewarding.
So we've come a long way.
We're in law number three, make it easy.
He talks about energy and motivation is precarious
and it fades quickly.
How many times have you woke up in
the morning?
You say, yep, today's the day.
I'm going to change my habits.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do that.
It's going to be different.
You've got high motivation.
You work out, you do Qur'an, you
read a book, you do all these things.
You eat healthy, you cook a good meal.
And then what happens?
What's tomorrow like?
What's a week later like?
Your motivation evaporates into thin air.
Motivation is precarious.
It fades quickly.
We can also see this from a different
angle that most of the things that you
do automatically without thinking about it, they are
things that take very, very little motivation to
do.
So imagine you scrolling your phone.
Imagine you vegging out on the couch, binging
Netflix.
These are things that take almost no motivation
to do whatsoever.
And that is the key to this particular
law, the law of least effort.
Imagine that you have a hose, a garden
hose.
Okay.
And your garden hose is folded in the
middle.
It's got a kink.
You turn the water on and there's some
water coming out, but not as much water
as you need.
Now you've got two options.
You can go back to the spigot and
you can open the water more and try
to blast the water as much as possible,
or you can try to unkink the hose.
Which is going to do better for you?
Obviously unkinking the hose.
Imagine that the spigot is your motivation and
imagine that all of the obstacles, okay, is
the kink in the hose.
It's way easier when it comes to your
habits rather than try to dial up that
motivation and watch these rise and grind motivational
YouTube videos first thing in the morning or
whatever you do for motivation, that stuff is
very, very transient.
It will leave very quickly.
It's way easier to just unkink the hose,
remove all of the obstacles, make it easy
to achieve your habits and do the things
that you want.
Structure your habits for ease.
Now we talked about this a little bit
when it comes to environmental design.
He talks about automating, eliminating, and simplifying.
So anything that you're able to automate, automate
it.
This is why rather than write a check
for your bills, remember we used to do
that back in the day, your electricity bill,
your phone bill, right?
You, you get out the checkbook and you
write it and then you balance your checkbook
and you send it in the mail.
You've got your stamps right there next to
you.
Nobody does that anymore except for people in
my parents' generation.
You have it on your phone.
You set up auto pay.
Boom.
It goes out automatically every month.
You don't have to worry about it because
you automated it.
Automating your habits makes them very, very easy
to make sure that you never miss.
Eliminating.
What is he talking about by eliminating?
He's talking about subtracting any of the disruptive,
distracting elements that you might have.
Okay.
There's a principle even in group work called
addition by subtraction.
Sometimes there's just one person in the room
that just makes it difficult to get anything
done.
Sometimes you take that person out and then
the team all of a sudden is unlocked
and unleashed and they can do what they
came to do.
So there are things like that in your,
in your life.
One of these things is clutter, right?
Clutter is a big thing that stops people
from doing their habits.
And that's why one of the things that
he advocates for is what he calls resetting
the room.
There's a very, very good habit to get
into that when you're done in a room,
you reset it for the next action that
you're going to do later.
Um, so imagine rather than you sit down
to a meal and you've got your plates
and you've got your silverware and you eat,
and then you've got the kitchen's kind of
a mess.
You've got your pots and your pans and
you eat lunch.
Then you run out the door because you
have to make your next appointment.
All right.
Now, when it comes to, you come back
later in the day and it's time for
dinner.
The house is a mess.
You not only have to cook, but you
have to clean up everything from before and
then cook.
Ah, that's when you reach for your phone
and order out because you would rather do
that.
And it's easier than resetting the room.
If your, your gym clothes are dirty or
your jogging outfits dirty, or you don't know
where your running shoes are, you wake up
in the morning.
You're like, all right, I'm going to go
for a jog today.
And you spend 15 minutes trying to hunt
your shoes down.
Okay.
It's very, very unlikely that you're going to
be able to, to actually complete that activity.
So in order to make it easier for
you, reset the room, you can flip this
for bad behaviors.
Okay.
So for every bad behavior that you have,
your job is to make it inconvenient.
Your job is to make it difficult.
Your job is to make it less easy.
So if you watch too much TV, try
unplugging the TV after every time that you're
done watching it, just that simple action of
having to plug it in and then fire
it up is going to stop you from
watching it unnecessarily.
Your phone.
That's the big one, right?
Try actually turning off your phone.
You know that it takes a good minute
or two minutes for your phone to boot
up.
Right?
So if you were actually to turn off
your phone during work hours or special times
of the day, you will find that you're
using your phone less because it's not on.
It's not convenient.
It's not easy.
So you can do these things in your
life to basically shape where you're going.
You want to make the bad habits that
you want to minimize more and more difficult.
And you want to make the things and
the habits that you want to repeat and
that you want to keep more and more
easy.
And with that, we will end there for
today.
We've got a lot more to cover.
Um, but we will see you next week
inshallah ta'ala.
I appreciate everybody.
May Allah accept your prayers and your worship
until next time.
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.