Tom Facchine – Surah Al-Kawthar & Atomic Habits
AI: Summary ©
The recitation of the Qworkah is discussed as a turning event that will cause humanity to forget the name of the person who made it. The importance of making good habits and habits that make one a good person is emphasized, such as avoiding procrastination and being attentive to one's prayer. The habit of reciting Qworkah for two minutes is also emphasized, but the next day is not allowed to do it. The host emphasizes the importance of practicing reciting Qworkah for two minutes to avoid habit issues and avoid reciting Qth alternate for two minutes.
AI: Summary ©
Now we're going to move to Tafsir, and
if you know about our Tafsir segment that
we've been going from the short surahs backwards
from the back of the Qur'an, and
we are both looking at the surah itself.
What does it mean?
And reflecting on the linguistic miracle of the
Qur'an that every single one of the
114 chapters of the Qur'an has at
least one unique word that does not exist
in any other chapter.
Now that's really remarkable, especially because some of
the chapters are extremely short.
In fact, the surah that we're going to
recite today is the shortest chapter of the
Qur'an.
It is only three sentences.
And yet, even with this very, very short
chapter, there are multiple words that are unique
to it that do not exist anywhere else
in the Qur'an.
And we're going to just look at one
of them.
So this particular chapter, we'll recite it.
Allah says, we have certainly given you, or
revealed to you, or granted to you, Al
-Kawthar.
And what is Al-Kawthar?
The literal meaning of Al-Kawthar is the
source of the rivers of paradise.
There are some also potential metaphorical meanings of
that as well.
Allah says, so pray to your Lord and
sacrifice.
Nihar refers to Eid al-Adha, the festival
or the holiday of the sacrifice, where we
follow in Ibrahim, Abraham's steps, alayhis salaam, in
sacrificing an animal for giving in charity.
Truly your enemy, he is the one that
is cut off.
And as you can tell, there's a context
behind the revelation of this particular chapter that
the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam had
daughters that survived childhood, but did not have
a son that survived childhood.
In fact, he had three baby boys in
his lifetime.
And when the last of them passed away,
some of his opponents mocked him.
Because as you know, Qurayshi society was a
very chauvinistic one.
It was a very masculine supremacist one, that
they viewed women very badly.
And they favored having male sons, having boys,
much more than they favored having girls.
They were very sad or upset.
Even Allah references this in the Qur'an,
that their faces would become dark and gloomy
if they were told the news that they
were to be having a baby girl.
Even some of them went to the extent
of burying their baby girls alive.
That's infanticide.
This was something that was practiced in Arabia,
that Islam came to change and to correct
and to fix.
And so when the final son of the
Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam died as
a baby, one of his enemies came up
to him and basically gloating in this fact,
said that you're cut off Muhammad.
Nobody's going to remember you.
You're not going to have any lineage.
Because the Arabs at that time, they understood
as lineage as only having to do with
sons and going through the male line.
Now, Allah revealed this chapter immediately in response
to this claim, that He said it is
certainly your enemy who is cut off rather
than you, O Muhammad.
And certainly, what is the most popular boy's
name in the world right now?
And for some time it has been, it
is Muhammad.
That Allah is giving a reminder that He,
the Creator, He is the one that gets
to decide people's fate.
He is the one that gets to decide
whether people are remembered or whether people are
forgotten entirely.
And certainly, the person who said this, and
I'm intentionally not mentioning his name, the person
who was gloating in the face of the
Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and threatening
this sort of threat or trying to make
him feel bad for this turn of events,
nobody remembers his name.
I mean in Islamic circles, we know his
name, but if you go to any random
person on the street, he's forgotten.
So, there's a turning of the tables here,
where Allah caused the particular individual who made
this, this very mean and insulting remark to
be forgotten, whereas the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam, despite having no male lineage, was
not just remembered, but the most remembered of
anybody.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is Al-Khafir
Al-Rafi, two of his names that reflect
his activity and the things that he does,
he is able to elevate, and he is
able to humiliate.
He is able to take somebody who is
obscure, and we've seen this happen especially in
the last 12 months in Gaza, in Palestine,
people who nobody knew existed, and they have
one striking moment of humanity, think of Khadid,
right?
I think of the other sort of heroes
that we've become familiar with, where they were
obscure, they were unknown, nobody knew their names
or the fact that they existed, and all
of a sudden in one moment, their humanity
goes viral, and all of a sudden everybody
is talking about them.
And then you'll have other people who will
try very, very hard to do things to
make a name for themselves, and they will
be completely forgotten.
That's up to Allah.
We are studying atomic habits, so the last
two chapters in the section about making it
easy are first, how to stop procrastinating, using
the two-minute rule, and then the last
chapter is how to make good habits inevitable,
and how to make bad habits impossible.
So when it comes to the first one,
how to stop procrastinating by using the two
-minute rule, he gives a very powerful analogy.
He says that habits are like entrance ramps
to a highway, meaning that there is a
cumulative effect to habits.
The choices that you make in the day
help set the table or set the stage
for the next set of choices that you
have to make.
And so there's something of a momentum at
play here, that if you make a good
decision and you start to embark on a
good habit, it unlocks the next set of
possibilities, which are better than if you had
chosen a bad habit, right?
So whether you look back at the end
of the day and say, well, this is
a good day, this is a bad day,
it often comes down to, well, what were
your choices?
Did you make an overall good amount of
choices or choices for good habits?
Or did you fall into bad habit and
then got really taken down into bad habit
after bad habit after bad habit?
And this should be familiar to us when
it comes to Muslims, especially how we make
our prayers.
Think about the type of prayer that you
have when you are in a rush.
Okay, your meeting went over, there's 10 minutes
left in the prayer time, you run into
the bathroom, you splash some water around, you
hurry to the prayer rug, you kind of
check nervously to see that you haven't missed
the time, and then you pray, and let's
be honest, that prayer is not your best
prayer.
It's not your most concentrated prayer, compared to
if you are able to organize your day,
where in half an hour before the prayer
is due, you are stepping away from your
work, or you're stepping away from your duties.
You very calmly are able to focus on
your purification.
You come to the prayer, you are able
to do some extra prayers before, you are
doing remembrance of God, you're doing your invocations,
and then you're able to step into the
prayer.
Having done all of that, you know that
your prayer is going to be way better.
You're going to be way more attentive, way
more pious, way more reverent to the Creator
in that prayer.
Sometimes we can't help it, there's circumstance, but
sometimes we can.
Sometimes we do have control, and we do
have choices, and the choices that you make
set the stage for the next set of
choices.
And so if you're able to do these
things, there's a cumulative effect, and there's momentum.
When we talk about this phenomenon in habit
formation, okay, sometimes our goals or our habits
are too grandiose.
They're too big, they're too large, and so
it's easy to procrastinate.
So for example, if you make your goal,
I want to have an attentive prayer, so
I'm going to block out a half an
hour for my prayer.
Okay, that's good, but it might seem like
a very big commitment.
It might be a little bit daunting.
So the key to this technique here, using
the two-minute rule, is to scale it
down.
Make it something that's extremely, extremely manageable.
And what you'll find is, because habits have
a cumulative effect, just focusing on the very,
very first thing, what he calls a gateway
habit, will actually create a cascading effect that
will make it easier to follow through with
the rest of the habits that you had
hoped to do in the first place.
So instead of saying that you want to
read more at night, let's make it just
read one page a day.
It might sound crazy, it might sound like
nothing.
I take this book, let's say you're having
a hard time finishing this book, okay?
And you've told yourself, well, I need to
read a chapter and I need to read
this much.
No, just read one page a day, okay?
Do you realize that in a year's time,
you'll have read 365 pages, right?
That's over, usually most books are not that
long.
Instead of saying, I'm going to go for
a run or a workout tomorrow morning, let's
just say you're going to put out your
work clothes and your goal is to change
into your work clothes.
What are you going to do in your
workout clothes after you change into them?
You're just going to go and make eggs
or have tea?
No, you're going to go work out, right?
Now, this is called a gateway habit.
It is essentially mastering the habit of showing
up, because most habits don't get ruined by
stopping them in the middle of us doing
them.
Most habits get ruined by the activation energy
that it starts to get into them or
start doing it in the first place.
This is a very, very good reminder for
perfectionists like myself who tend to let perfect
become the enemy of good.
If you're really, really struggling with this phenomenon,
there's a way to use the two-minute
rule to your benefit.
The two-minute rule is a trick and
it's counterintuitive.
How does it work?
You have to only do two minutes of
your habit.
You're actually not allowed to do more.
Okay, so in extreme circumstances, let's take the
Qur'an.
I think all of us can practice this
at home.
Say you've gone some days without reciting Qur
'an.
Your goal is to recite Qur'an for
two minutes and you have to stop after
two minutes.
You're not allowed to go past that.
You might be like, well, I can do
more.
Yes, that's the point.
You can do more.
We don't want you to do 30 minutes
today and nothing tomorrow because if you do
30 minutes today and you're not in the
habit of doing it, then the next day
you're going to say, oh, I can't do
my 30 minutes and so I might as
well not do it.
You're going to fall off your habit.
So, let's stay below, as he says, the
point where it feels like work.
If it's working out, work out for two
minutes.
Read Qur'an, read Qur'an for two
minutes.
Doing chores or a particular chore that you
don't like, do it just for two minutes
and then stop.
And do it consistently every day for just
two minutes until you have built the habit.
Remember way back, we talked about how habits
are very much about identity.
Let's say losing weight.
You want to be a healthy person.
Instead of worrying about becoming in shape, you
are being the person who doesn't miss workouts.
Look at that.
Are those workouts two minutes long?
Yes, they're two minutes long.
If you're able to do this consistently, you
will solidify your identity as somebody who doesn't
miss workouts, somebody who sticks to the plan,
and you can worry about scaling up the
habits later.
Now, the next rule, how to make good
habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.
And he gives a really funny story of
Victor Hugo, the famous French author who was
under a deadline to write a book from
his publisher.
He was procrastinating like all of us do.
So, you can feel good because even Victor
Hugo is procrastinating.
So, in order to meet his deadline, I
think he had something like six months to
turn out a novel, and he hadn't done
like anything on it.
He took all of his possessions, all of
his clothing, everything, and he turned it over
to somebody else to lock it up, to
lock it away and take it away from
him.
And he literally only had a shawl, and
he stayed in his room continuously for six
months without any distractions whatsoever.
And in six months time, he wrote The
Hunchback of Notre Dame.
So, that was how sometimes with your habits,
you actually have to remove the bad habits
or remove the temptation for bad habits.
You have to make your bad habits impossible
in order to unlock the inevitability of your
good habits.
Victor Hugo locking up his possessions would be
called a commitment device.
A commitment device is a choice that you
make in the present that controls your actions
in the future.
Let's say that you want to eat smaller
portions, okay?
Rather than plate up a huge plate of
food and only eat half of it.
Most people don't have the self-control to
do that.
You use a smaller plate.
If you eat off of a smaller plate,
you are automatically determining how much food you
can eat.
If you take the television out of your
bedroom, you can't watch it in the bedroom.
So, it's a very, very easy fix.
You're making choices as a commitment device that
is going to help you or it's going
to make the bad habit impossible.
What this does, it allows you to take
advantage of your good intentions and plan for
the times where you might fall into temptation.
Because everybody has good intentions and says early
in the morning, I'm going to do this,
I'm going to do that, right?
But then when push comes to shove, there's
always this little temptation along the way.
Oh, I wonder what so-and-so put
on social media.
Oh, I wonder if there's anything new in
the news.
Oh, I wonder if anybody messaged me.
And then you check.
And when you check, you are opening up
a bad habit.
And now you've scrolled for 20 minutes and
you completely forgot what you were doing.
It's not an accident that scrolling is so
addictive because it requires zero effort whatsoever.
So, you basically have to make scrolling require
a ton of effort, right?
Shutting down your phone entirely at certain points
of the day.
Extremely, extremely useful.
Social commitment devices are really important too.
So, if you're doing it with other people,
that if you miss your Qur'an halaqah
or something, you're going to have to face
the Shaykh or you're going to have to
face your classmate.
Your classmate is going to ask you, why
weren't you there, right?
These types of things are very, very important
when it comes to minimize, making your bad
habits very, very hard and unlocking your good
habits.
So, that's all we've got for you this
week.
I hope everybody is having a good week
and they're in good health and good.
Iman inshaAllah.
We hope to see you next time on
the program.
BarakAllahu feekum.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.