Walead Mosaad – Session 2 Beautify Your Home
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of personal spiritual health and how it can be distorted by family and other personal experiences. They stress the need for people to be mindful of their own well-being and find a way to achieve their spiritual foundation. The importance of activity-based behavior and finding personal spiritual home spaces is emphasized, along with the importance of regular sleep and intentionality in achieving spiritual warring hole. The importance of regular sleep and flexible breathing techniques is emphasized, along with the importance of focus on the morning, evening routine, daily stress, and daily stress.
AI: Summary ©
So,
thank you, Sheikh Hamuslima for,
and the majlis for agreeing
to facilitate and host, this program
or this set of sessions called beautify your
home.
As I heard, some of you may be
joining us for the first time and and
missed last week.
Fortunately, alhamdulillah, we have the recording. So,
we can watch them out of order to
make a huge difference, but I I recommend
that if you,
find benefit in this session that you go
back and listen
to, the first one since we're kind of
trying to build,
concepts,
one on the other.
And just briefly we had mentioned,
last week this idea of beautifying the home.
And home here we mean something that is
meaningful and conceptual, not just physical.
And, you know, we said about the home
that this is the place where you
likely, especially in the age of COVID, spend
most of your time.
This is the place where you sleep. This
is the place where you eat. This is
the place where,
those closest relationships
that you have in your life and likely
for the rest of your life
are going to be and are going to
be formed and are going to develop.
What you do
at home,
will
influence what you do outside of the home.
The manner by which you exit your house,
the manner by which you enter your house,
all those things,
will have direct effects on you and it
will have direct effects on the people around
you. It will have direct effects on the
people that you deal with outside of the
home. So,
and we went through some verses of the
Quran that you can listen to in the
last session that we talked about
that all kind of,
underline,
this very important idea of the home.
Al bayt or al manzib
or al mazken.
You know, even the different words that we
use in Arabic, they each give a little
bit shade of meaning.
Right? So bayt makenin mabit.
The house is the place where you spend
the night. Beitayabitu
mabitan.
And menzin
makenen nuzul.
So, this is the place where
after you've been doing whatever you've been doing
outside, then you come back and,
Tinsil. Right? You you descend into this place.
Al Mesken.
Right? Minas Sekina
or Makanu Sukum.
So this is the place of stillness.
Right? You can also infer from that. This
is the place where you would recharge,
and,
you know, get ready to
continue with life and continue on with another
day,
and the next day and the day after
that and day after that and so forth.
So, the home also is the building block
of the community, of the society, of the
neighborhood. You don't have a neighborhood without homes.
And you don't have
a home without the people who make up
the home
and the individuals who comprise that whole and
the relationships between those individuals.
And so you can't really build culture. You
can't build societies. You can't build neighborhoods.
You can't change cultures
except,
and I firmly believe this, via
change in the home or
stability in the home or,
all of the things that we want to
see happen in the neighborhood,
all of the things that we want to
see happen in
society, all the things we want to see
happen in the greater culture, they have to
begin in the home.
And I think,
one of the
challenges
we're contending with is I don't think a
lot of people think about that.
A lot of the
promotion for change, let's call it, that people
are trying to do, rarely do they focus
on the home. Most of the time they're
looking at the, you know, the macro aspect
of it, like on the big scale.
You know, how do we change this
this government or how do we change how
this government behaves or how do we change
how the culture behaves towards a certain group.
But if if you don't instill the the
values and the ethics and the morals
that are need that need to be instilled
on the level of the home where they
are best to develop and best
to be inculcated and to be learned, then
it becomes very difficult to do something
outside of that. So families are extremely important
and families reside in homes. So we could
have also called this beautify your family.
But not everybody
lives in the typical family, but most people
at least
have a place where they they settle down
and they call home. So that's kind of,
you know, the the
the take that we were we were looking
at.
So,
what I had done last week and I
believe where I left off,
the approach I'm going to take, we're going
to do 8 of these sessions insha'Allah,
it's al Hayyan Allah.
So, probably ending towards the beginning of Ramadan
right before the beginning of Ramadan.
And we're going to look at 3
areas,
3 main areas.
So I actually structured them like a house.
I did send a PowerPoint picture out. I
don't know if you received it. But think
of the
bottom or the foundation
of the house, which, or the home, which
you don't see. But nevertheless,
you wouldn't have a home without it, but
it forms a foundation. So if you're walking
down the street
and you're looking at people's apartments or people's
homes,
you don't really see that
physical foundation and you don't see what I'm
not really talking about as a physical foundation,
play,
right,
you
may be a husband,
you may
play, right, you may be
a husband, you may be a wife, you
may be a parent or you may be
a child or you may be someone else.
But everyone is going to have a particular
role, but you won't be able to fulfill
that role, I think,
in the best contributive way unless
that foundation is built within you first. So
this is what we're gonna be focusing on,
which we focused on a little bit last
session
and and all of this session and maybe
a little bit of the 3rd session as
well, looking at that personal
spiritual foundation.
Then when we focus upon that, then we
can think about, well, how do I bring
my personal foundation and then bring it into
a shared
space.
Right? Again, that space is physical definitely in
a home, but it's also,
meaningful, not just
in a physical sense. So
you may be sharing space physically with another
human being, but that shared space
transcends and goes beyond to a shared
spiritual space, if you will. So your mood,
your words,
your vibe,
you know, you live long enough with somebody
and you pick up on their vibe, you
know, in kind of the vernacular of today
but we would call it hal.
Right?
And people used to say things to each
other and they still do like kafal hal.
Right? And that's kind of a very spiritual
way of looking at things like how is
your state.
Or khalibailak.
Right? Khali. Khali means empty out your baal.
Your baal means
your spiritual state. You know?
Rid yourself
of ham. Rid yourself
of worries and anxiety.
Khali balek.
Nowadays people say it when like you're about
to hit a pedestrian in the street
or something in Cairo. But
the original meaning behind it is,
you know, like, just empty out,
the,
you know, whatever worries and anxieties and so
forth.
And so, like, having the the pulse
of other people around you,
this sort of intimacy
is probably something a lot of people are
uncomfortable with today and maybe shy away from.
And,
we tend to wear masks.
No pun intended, COVID,
but even
like
meaningful masks, masks that we're hiding.
So, we were wearing masks before COVID started.
So, maybe the physical mask was just an
affirmation of the mask we were already wearing.
But I don't want to get too esoteric
with everybody.
So the mask
is
we're loathed to
share kind of that sort of
because we feel vulnerable when we do that,
when we kind of let people see us
for who we really are. So we tend
to put up these facades.
And that's difficult to do in a home,
people you're sharing that
space with. And if you attempt to do
that while you're in the home with people
who are supposed to be close to you,
it will introduce a level of stress into
your life, I think, that will not be
lifted unless you recognize first, like, wait.
If I can't be myself here, then, you
know,
or can't be me or I can't be
someone who lets their guard down in front
of, you know, the people closest to me,
then who can I let my guard down
in front
of? And that's important because human beings we
crave intimacy and it's important for our own
well-being,
spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological, so forth,
to be able to do that. And the
home is where you learn to do that.
Children who grow up in a home where
the parents don't show that or they don't
know how to do that, then they grow
up in being adults who don't do that
either.
So,
I don't mean to kind
of belabor the point, but really
it's it's,
we can't put enough emphasize it enough enough.
You know, we can't
highlight it enough, the importance of of these
factors. So this the shared spiritual,
environment then is people are gonna pick up
on, you know, on your vibe, on your
hat. And actually,
this is where
positive
vibes, positive ahuel also can be
transmitted from one person to the next.
And you know we look at the
generation of the sahaba of the companions of
the Prophet
they felt that way about the Prophet
Just being in his presence,
right, was like a life changing transformative experience,
that would do not be the same even
for however fleeting
that,
that the call that meeting was. And and
hence, you know, the say that if a
person met the prophet
even once saw them,
shared space like saw each other,
Then they are Sahabi, then they are companion.
So, they could have been someone like Abu
Bakr Siddiq who knew the Prophet very intimately
all his life,
even before Nabuwa, even before Prophet. And then
there are some of the other
tens of thousands of sahaba who didn't know
the Prophet that well but met him once.
Maybe they came in the 9th year, Ayam
al Wufood,
the year of delegation, and they came and
saw him and said 2 words and went
back to
their place. But there was a hobby,
right, because
that ain't enough
was transformative.
I think I mentioned here last week,
once some people someone asked a question about,
you know, activities. What are the activities that
we do, activities in the house? And,
one of the things I want to also
stress is that
sometimes we just need to share space doing
things
that people just do.
Like sharing meals, like eating, like just sitting
down together in the living room and having
a conversation.
That in of itself is an activity.
But since we're so activity
focused,
right, we're
looking up all the latest studies about
what activities you should do with your children
and and and how often and these sorts
of things. And we feel like if we
leave
time that's unscheduled
or unstructured is a better word, if we
leave time that's unstructured, then somehow
there's something wrong with that.
Actually, no. I think
to me the marker of a good home
is how do you spend your unstructured time?
Right? What what do you do? Is it
natural?
Is it composed? Is it balanced? Is it
beautiful, that unstructured time just, you know, being
with in another's company, just speaking, asking about
Wednesday or preparing meals together or sharing meals
or, you know, helping each other on some
task that the other may have to do
rather than this,
I think aggressive pressure to always feel like
to be on and to and to do
something,
that's activity based that's going to
somehow, you know,
be added to the overall, meter by which
you measure your your success in life. And
I think it's not a good model, to
follow.
And one of the things I want to
talk about also is
slowing things down. I'm going to talk about
intentionality a little bit and sometimes we just
need to
slow things down by pondering and contemplating why
am I doing this? And
if I'm doing this,
now let me think of a good reason
why I'm going to be doing this or
good reasons
why I'd be doing this. And we'll talk
about that in a little bit.
So shared spiritual environment. And then at the
top, you know, with the top of the
house, 2nd floor,
would be our relationships.
So how do we navigate? How do we
negotiate the shared space?
And I'm not just talking about who gets
first access to the coffee machine in the
morning. That's a negotiation, obviously.
I know about that.
But also,
the relationships in terms of, you know, parents
to to children, siblings with one another,
neighbors,
people who come and visit to the house,
and so forth. You know, one of the
things that, struck me,
my family and I, we spent
most of our lives actually not in the
United States and other countries where there was
more of a communal
sort of
way of doing things. And
when we came back to the States several
years ago, I was kind of a little
bit
bewildered, not bewildered but just found it interesting
that people here, even the way that we
visit one another is very structured and set
up. Maybe I'm just old too, so I
let's caveat that. And we have Eventbrite,
you know, like setups for, like, when we
can visit one another and we have to
schedule that. And I recall that we would
just, you know, if I wanted to see
somebody, I go knock on their door. If
they're home, they open. And if they're not
home, I go back. And,
this was even before cell phones, I recall
this, and even a little bit after cell
phones.
And there was kind of a natural
feel to it.
Also,
we won't get to in this class, maybe
we do a
follow-up class that's called beautify your community or
beautify your neighborhood or beautify your mosque.
Maybe it'll be a series. We'll see. But
to create
spaces where we can naturally
do that,
where we can meet up. One of the
challenging things about living in,
advanced developed, whatever you're going to call it,
Western societies
is the outside space has been very much
commercialized and commodified.
So, if you want to meet up,
okay, let's meet up for coffee. Okay, that
means we're going to go somewhere and spend
money, alright, which is a place that's commodified.
Someone else set up that space to make
a profit. It's not really just a public
space.
Or for a meal
or at a restaurant or share an experience
like watching a movie together. So these are
the kind of things people tend to
get together with.
Whereas,
in more traditional societies, you had more spaces
that that people would naturally get together.
It's almost cliche, but the study that they
said about
women who used to live in villages
before they got washing machines, they would all
see each other down at the river
where they would wash
their, you know, they would designate a day
of the week and sometimes
they'd meet up and and and they would
wash their their wares and their clothing and
all that sort of thing at the river.
So it was kind of very much a
communal
experience. And then the washing machine comes into
play and more people can afford it. And
then they're just sitting in a house,
put their load in and then just wait
but then they're not meeting with their friends.
So they're kind of isolated,
in the house which was kind of a
byproduct of that particular
piece of technology. And we're going to talk
about technology also
in these sessions.
So these kind of natural
spaces
that were there and that came out of
I think a deep and profound understanding
of the deen of Islam.
And you found the mosque, the masjid was
at the center.
And, you know, think about it 5 times
a day
People are coming together and seeing one another.
Not just seeing one another. It's actually physical
touching.
Right? You're lining up
in prayer
5 times a day.
You don't even have to check up on
people that way because
and I lived in a society like this.
When someone didn't show up for fresher prayer
or saw for Isha and they know that
he's a regular, then we'd all go and
visit go to his house and see if
anything's wrong.
Are they sick? Or they need something? And
that sort of thing. And so it was
kind of a very natural way for
these cohesive bonds,
I think to
develop.
So, yeah, I mean,
it sounds a little nostalgic but I think
also we have to think about how do
we not do it exactly the same way,
that may not be possible, but how do
we kind of introduce
these more natural ways
or to use our term of today, organic
ways
by which we can
come together and be together and
enjoy each other's
suhbah,
right? Just like the companions enjoy the suhbah
with the prophet by virtue of just being
with him,
then we also
can find some of that inshallah.
So, let's look at specifically
what we call
personal spiritual
foundation.
So, one thing that I recommend for everybody
is,
you walk into
an interview
for a job and the cliche question that
they're going to ask you is
like those 3 questions. Why do you wanna
work here?
And,
tell me about a situation that was difficult
and how you got out of it or
what you did in that thing.
And then they'll say where do you see
yourself 5 years from now?
So
I think also spiritually we have to think
about well where do I see myself not
just 5 years from now but like tomorrow
or the day after or
next week.
And it means you need to have a
little bit of a plan
or
a methodology
for
improving yourself, on a spiritual level.
And you may say, well don't we already
have that? Don't we pray the 5 times
in the day and don't we pay the
Zakat and we go to Hajj when we
have the chance and we go to Umrah.
So isn't that kind of already built in
in the deen? I would say yes and
no.
Yes, certainly.
Allah did not make those things obligatory except
so that He does give us those built
in things.
But also,
it is quite possible to still be doing
those things
and be stagnant
spiritually.
So
there has to be in a ash. Right?
There has to be a type of invigoration
of
your spiritual state by
always looking to do something better, to get
closer, right? Taqarrub ir Allah Subhana Wa Ta'la.
Iqdisabrid
Allah earning Allah's
contentment with you
and finding yourself
closing the gap which is not a physical
gap but a spiritual one that is encompassed
by your ego basically
between you and Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. So
closing that gap between you and God
also should be,
one of those goals. And so we need
to think about, well, what am I doing
for that? Am I actually doing anything specific?
Or am I just going through life on
autopilot
and
just moving from one thing to the next
and doing kind of
wealth.
Getting a bigger house and a nicer car
and saving enough for my children's,
schooling and college thereafter, getting them married and
then going on retirement or
somewhere where it's sunny and warm and I
don't have to deal with winter and then
die.
And you could still be doing all of
those things,
but
that's not really what you're doing. That's like
outwardly it looks like what you're doing. But
inside,
right, you actually have this program. Are you
reading are you still reading the same
surah everyday in your prayer? Like do you
read just like the last 3 or 4
surahs in
the Mus'haf
everyday and you're not actually trying to do
something different?
The Quran is
a 114 Surah's because
every
surah, every chapter in the Quran will give
you what we call a type of talween,
right? Talween which means a coloring of your
soul that an Allah Surah will
not. So, think of yourself as,
ideally an empty vessel
that has
colorless
liquid in it,
water.
So
your Ibadah, the acts of worship that you
do,
the Surahs that you read, the verses that
you read, the intentions that you have, all
of these things because they are varied, they
give you a different talween.
They give you a different
lone color,
right? A spiritual color.
So you introduce greens and reds and purple
and violet and yellow and all these sorts
of things.
But
if you're doing the same thing
over and over again and not changing anything
and not trying to do something different then
you become stagnant and then it becomes like
a gray.
So, you still have a color but it's
not really colorful.
It's just, you know, you've
deprived yourself of what's really there and that's
why we believe in every single aspect
of whatever Allah Subhawn Wa Ta'la has us
to do or obligated us to do or
recommended us to do, there is a tallween.
The ruku is different than the sujood.
Reading the fatha is is different than reading
Surat.
Saying Assalamu alaikum
is different than saying Assalamu Alaikum Warahmatullah.
It's different than saying Assalamu Alaikum Warahmatullahi Barakatru.
Saying SubhanAllah is different than saying Alhamdulillah is
different than saying Allahu Akbar is different than
saying La Haula Walakut Illa Billah.
Each one of these things gives you talween.
Right? It gives you in a particular
spiritual color for
you. But again, in order to
to properly benefit
to the maximum, to the utmost, in the
best way,
you have to empty the vessel first. It
has to be clear liquid it's dealing with.
If you're already colored with your zenub,
right, with your
sins
or with your trepidations, with your anxieties, with
your hang ups,
then that Teluin is not gonna find a
place where it can easily
be dyed into
the base that's you. It'll find difficulty in
doing that. So that's why they say
So tahali means to
remove
all of those,
imperfections as best as you can and vices
and shortcomings and hang ups.
Tahlil,
that's the tallween.
Right? It's bringing in all of these beautiful
things that will beautify your soul. And then
you will have tajalli.
And tajalli is to see Allah as He
truly is as you can as human being.
Right?
That Allah Subhana Wa Ta'la then he's manifesting
himself everywhere all the time but now you'll
have the ability to perceive it and see
it
to worship Allah Subha'ala as if you see
him.
So
we we we have to do that. I
think it's important and everyone should be thinking
about that.
But more specifically, and this is not a
course for that, we have other courses on
the YouTube that kind of deal with that
specifically. But here, we're just going to touch
upon what I think are kind of,
the major aspects, especially as they relate to
the home and relationships.
So,
I wanna talk about time management,
and I wanna talk about
accumulation
slash acquisition management, you know, the things that
you buy.
And I wanna talk about anger management.
So all those things you might have heard
of them in a different context, but they
very much squarely
relate to
this this issue of the home and how
to beautify the home. So
time management. It's interesting to me that
Muslims started talking about time and its importance
way before all these time management courses that
people are talking about. I remember back maybe
in the late nineties,
time management was really a big deal and
all corporations were paying for people to do
a time management class. I remember I was
working,
at a job in in New York City
and they sent us on a course for
1 or 2 day and
this so called,
groundbreaking
and novel way of managing your time and
they handed us these thick diaries
like this big and it had different color
tabs.
And it was a way to kind of,
you know, help you manage your time and
so forth because that was what's going to
help the corporation
and for you to be the most efficient
and productive
employee and then maximize the profits of whatever
company you're working for.
But, Muslims talked about that a long time
ago.
Imam al Shafa, he said, I I spent
company with the sufia and I learned 2
things from them. Alwaktuka
safe
nafsuqah
illam tajril habil khaisha khalat kha bishar.
Those were the 2 really important things I
learned from them. He said time is like
a sword
and then there's a tekmila. There's a addendum
to that.
If you don't cut with it, it cuts
you. So that's how time is like a
sword. Either you're using it or it's using
you.
Either it's,
you are lording over it or it lords
over you. That's how time works.
And then the other thing that you learn
which is also very important,
your soul,
if you don't busy it with good, it
will busy you with evil
which is somehow also related to time I
think as well.
Right? So, to be busy with good
and they have this concept of taamir alwakht.
Taamir alwakht. And, toamir waqtaka bilkhayr.
Right? Tamir means like to build,
to occupy. So, occupy your time with good,
occupy your time with hir, occupy your time
with chidma, right, with service.
So,
this is one of the most challenging things
I think today for all of us.
For societies that seem that we have so
many of what used to be
mundane tasks
that,
hitherto
took
like days to do or much work to
do, simple task of washing your clothes,
right, of procuring your daily bread like actually
getting food,
of
tending
to
your needs in terms
of basic necessities. These things have been vastly
facilitated.
Literally today, you don't have to leave your
house. At the touch of your
smartphone, you can order anything and it could
be if it's food, it could be at
your door in minutes.
And if it's something that like,
even bigger than that like
a snow blower,
you can get it in 48 hours from
Amazon.
So facilitated, so easy, right? And all of
the things
to do your proper research if you want
to about this thing that you want to
buy
also been facilitated
versus just a few decades ago.
You could probably spend a weekend looking for
that snow blower going to different stores back
and forth and that sort of thing. But
now it's all facilitated. Now people are even
buying homes in in the age of COVID
from far away because they have like a
virtual walk through or a virtual showing of
the house.
But
yet it seems like we don't have enough
time.
And it seems like everyone complains
that we're always
short on time
even though we have so many of these
modern convenience
features
that help us to
spend or free us to do time or
to spend our time with things that are
better to do. And that was kind of
the promise of many of these technological advancements
that it will free you up to do
the things that are more important in life.
But what has actually happened, I think, is
the technology itself has occupied your time.
The nature of some of the technology, and
I'm going to talk about technology,
has sucked you in so that it actually
robs you of your time.
And we know this from, you know, the
smart devices and the phones and the and
and then the applications that can be run
on social media and so forth.
So
it seems like
we are constantly
distracted.
And I think we all know this on
a very basic intellectual level. We don't deny
it. We're quite aware of it, but we
often seem helpless to do anything about it.
That's the challenge.
First thing I would say is don't blame
yourself too much.
These things that are grabbing our attention were
designed
by people who know the human psyche in
and out so that they do exactly that.
They constantly grab your attention and do not
let go.
Mark Zuckerberg and
Jeff Bezos
and all those guys, they don't care about
our physical well-being. They care about the bottom
line as it were, making profits. So if
you were to spend,
12 or 14 of your working hours on
Facebook,
Facebook is perfectly fine with that. They don't
have any issue. There's no warnings that are
going to be issued on the screen that'll
say, uh-oh. You spent too much time on
Facebook today
or Instagram, time to kind of take a
break, let go, that sort of thing. That's
not going to happen. Well, I shouldn't say
never but hasn't happened
as of yet. There's no issue with that
because you indeed you're the product.
Right? You what what Facebook makes money off
is you. Your likes, your
clicks and and and then the advertising then
algorithmically
is sent to your way. That's the whole
thing. And I I think I read the
the phrase if you pay nothing for something,
right, of a service, then know that you're
the product.
Right? You're you're you're paying yourself. You're paying
your soul basically,
for that service. So it's not for free.
It does cost something.
So,
then the issue then becomes,
don't blame yourself too much, number 1. These
things are designed to suck up your time.
Number 2,
know that you have limited
attention energy.
Your ability to pay attention to something or
anything is limited.
And, you may feel that it becomes even
more limited as you grow older or as
you become more sucked into some of these
applications.
So then you have to have priorities and
where you're going to put your attention energy.
So, pay it I read in a recent
article. Pay attention to what you're paying attention
to.
So, treat it as like you would treat
anything that you consume.
So if
like you're watching your food, your diet and
you're looking at the calories and, you know,
that's too many calories. I'm not going to
take that or I'll eat this and this
is the right number of calories. You should
also think about in terms of your attention
span.
If I click on this article
about, I don't know, this Hollywood celebrity and
their most recent divorce,
it may take me 3 minutes to read
but in terms of my attention energy,
right, if I was at, like, 56%
before that and then it takes me 3
minutes but then it zaps me a little
bit and now I'm down to 52%,
is it worth it?
So that click, it may seem harmless and
it may seem like a
meaningless distraction, but actually it
it kinda it it takes away from you.
And you don't really realize
how much it takes away from you until
you leave it.
Right? While you're inside the bubble, while you're
inside
the, you know, the so called distraction zone
let's call it.
You can't see what it looks like outside
of the distraction
zone. But if you pull yourself out of
it then you're looking back at like what
was I doing? You know, like there's so
much, so many better things I could be
using my time with than that. So removalavoidance
of distractions is very important.
So that means how you structure your time
is important
and also
how
you
deal with your unstructured time, because we talked
about unstructured time as well. So your unstructured
time also there should be a methodology
to it. You know we can't always be
like let's say on all the time,
even in terms of worship.
No one expects anyone to worship, you know,
20 fourseven and, you know, to be in
a constant state of physical worship. Even the
prophet
did not do that. And
he
criticized those who tried to do that.
And there were 3 young men. One of
them was even Sayidna Ali
and they said We're not going to marry,
we're going to be celibate,
and
most of us heard of this before and
one said, I will pray the night and
I will never
sleep. And the other one said, I will
fast every day and not break my fast.
And the prophet
said
because they wanted to be like the prophet.
The back story to that is why did
they wanna go to that extreme? Well, they
said for us to be in the company
of the prophet
especially in paradise, how are we ever going
to reach that level
unless we go to this
extreme. So, it was their love for the
Prophet
that drove them to it. But nevertheless, the
Prophet he told them,
I have the most taqwa out of all
of you and I have the most kashyah
fear mixed with love,
kashyah
out of all of you.
Right? In another hadith.
And this is my sunnah. So he said,
I marry and
I sleep at night and sometimes I pray.
Prophet
SAW slept some of the nights, sometimes he'd
sleep in the duhah time after
the daybreak.
Sometimes he would take a nap in the
afternoon.
He slept
and even the companions mentioned how we hurt.
We know he'll be asleep because we can
hear him his breathing as a sleeping person.
And he said, I don't fast every day.
Some days I fast and some days I
do not.
Yes, he fasted Mondays Thursdays.
All the time? No, not all the time.
Most of the time. He fasted a lot
of days in
Shaban
and sometimes he didn't. And
Aisha would say sometimes I'd see him fasting
so much like I thought he would never
stop fasting.
And sometimes I'd see him not fasting that
I said to myself he's never gonna
fast. So, the Prophet said, Let them say
Ibadah. There was a dawma to it as
described also by Aisha.
But there was a consistent
practice,
right? So in terms of our Ibadah, our
acts of worship, we want to do things
consistently.
So this moves into
the the second thing that I want to
talk about in terms of
time, I call it the lytanization of time.
That's not a word but I made it
up.
I don't know if that's okay but I
know the word litany.
So what I meant by that is
to make your time awrad.
So the wirid is a concept
that you find mentioned in the books of
spiritual
purification
and other books. Wird in the language, Arabic
language, originally means
watering hole of an animal. So, the animal
would go there.
So, what's the connection between watering hole and
wird? Something that you do as a litany.
In other words, consistently.
The relationship is that
the animal goes to the watering hole daily
or consistently.
It can't survive,
right, if it lives in the African savannah
and it's a wildebeest or a zebra or
whatever it is, until it goes
consistently, maybe not every day but certainly
several times a week to drink from the
watering hole. So for us,
our
spiritual,
gidah, our spiritual
nourishment
has to come from this
spiritual warring hole that we call the wird,
the wird.
So,
some of these things are built into our
time already.
Like what? The 5 prayers.
Nothing is more evident
of how important
time is than the 5 prayers itself. Even
the Qur'an says so.
In the salatakana aadal mumineena kitaban
mawkutah.
Kitaban mawkutah, mawkut min alwakt.
So, the prayers kitaban here means it was
prescribed,
mokuten,
in its prescribed times.
Right? So we don't have the option if
we are,
practicing Muslims to pray whenever we feel like
it only.
There
are set times during the day, and they're
spread pretty much balanced and equally throughout the
day.
And they line up with,
certain
natural phenomena.
So, there's this cosmic connection also with the
times that we pray
and the prayer itself. So, the Fajr or
the Subha prayer at
dawn,
right? Just the beginning from the darkness starting
now into the light of the new day.
And the Zohar prayer at,
commencing at when the sun is the highest
in the horizon, its zenith right after
that. And the Asar prayer,
when the sun has,
you know, descended,
not literally, but descended in the horizon to
almost some hours before the sunset.
And then the sunset, obviously Maghrib is Maghrib.
And then the hishah when the
leftover remnants either of the redness or the
whiteness of the horizon have dissipated. Now, it's
completely dark.
And so, they all
have these specific
and incidentally each prayer has its specific talween
as well as we mentioned earlier. So you're
going to get something out of feijr prayer
that you don't get out
of luhr prayer. And if you're a person
who consistently prays feijr but you pray it
after you wake up after sunrise,
you will not getting the same thing. It's
qadah,
InshaAllah. And you have a technically you have
a sharia
dispensation because you were asleep.
However,
you will not get the same thing in
the Qada, in the makeup,
as you would get it in the ada,
as if you did it at the time
when it was still dark out.
And, you know, the Quran describes the Quran
in the Fajr in other words, the prayer
in the Fajr is Mashood.
It is being witnessed. Of course, all the
prayers are being witnessed but there's a type
of Khususi. There's something specific about the feijr
prayer that maybe not in the other prayers.
The Hadith Al Bukhari kind of confirms this
meaning when it says that there are malaika
of the day and malaikah of the night
angels of the day and angels of the
night. And some come at the fezr prayer
while you're praying and then others will come
at the Asr prayer while you're praying.
So, it's like a shift.
So, some say the Asr prayer is Salatul
Wusta
the middle prayer and then the Quran Al
Fajri. Others say the Fajr is the Wusta
prayer or the middle prayer or here it
could also
mean that it's
the prayer of the day
night coming into the day. Wakanda Meshuoden,
right? It is a witness prayer by that
particular group of angels. So these cosmic connections
specifically to the times of prayer cannot
be denied.
They are extremely, extremely
important.
So
if the prayers then, which is the most
important Ibadah,
the most important act of worship
are spaced out in that particular way
to give a rhythm to our day.
Traditional Muslim peoples, the rhythm of the day
is certainly focused around the prayer. People wouldn't
say, I'll meet you at 2 o'clock. They'd
say, I'll meet you after Asr
or after Zuhr or let's do it after
Asha.
Right? And they didn't do that so that
they can be,
you know,
dodgy with the exact time. No, because that's
that's when people got together and that's when
they would see one another, and so the
riddle of the day kind of focused
around that.
If it's so important for the prayer, then
I think it's also important
for other things. So to do things and
I think
I've read in articles and things like that
by so called experts that to do things
that's consistently at the same time every day
will help you achieve that thing.
I want to talk about sleep which came
in time management, but sleep is one of
those things too, to sleep consistently at the
same time, wake up at the same time.
My doctor friend, Doctor. Yes was nodding so
I think that's okay to say that. He
agrees
that you
sleep
consistently
at the same time every day and wake
up at the same time.
To build these
also routines into your day that
become the source of blessing and barakah. Because
barakah means
even something small
but
the thing that comes out of it, the
blessing come out of it is big.
So, you know, we want to litanize
our time. So obviously, the obligatory acts of
worship,
the daily voluntary acts of worship as well.
If we can do the Rawatib or the
Nawafil
that are
done at the same time,
you know, between
thehur and after
before Dhuhr and after Dhuhr, after Asr
before Asr,
sorry, after Maghrib. So, these Rawatib or these
Nawafil
also to try to do them. If we
intend to do them, try to do them
consistently.
That's why I say to people don't do
them all at once.
You want to introduce your let's call it
your strategy
is to introduce acts of worship, voluntary ones,
in as much as you can be consistent
with them the rest of your life.
That should be the goal.
So, if you're doing the 5 prayers,
good then you can think about maybe al
Witter which is the next most important one.
If you're not doing the 5 prayers, then
focus on the 5.
Get that consistent. Don't think about the other
prayers yet
until you do the 5,
obligatory prayers consistently
and pretty much
effortlessly
and Allah will give you that insha Allah,
then we
can think about other things.
And
and other things as well.
So,
I wrote here also daily
stress relievers.
Very important.
So many of us, we work in very
high pressure environments, jobs,
whether it be in the medical field or
in the corporate world or
education. Actually, there's nothing that's not high pressure
anymore, I think.
There's really no laid back job, I think,
as it
were. So we need to have built in
within our routines ways to relieve
that stress
or coping mechanisms.
And one of the things that our teachers
tell us is that sometimes you need to
change the environment.
You just need to step out.
Either step out of the room, step out
of a particular space that you're in, and
even better would be to step into something
that is peaceful, that is serene, like somewhere
outside,
something of nature, taking walks.
People used to take walks
much more consistently than we do today. And
unfortunately, many of our cities, especially in North
America, are not really designed for people to
walk
that much. You actually usually have to drive
somewhere,
to take a walk, right, like in a
park or something like that.
But
that's the foot traffic is another that's another
space that people were meeting, right? When people
took walks, they were just
of casually
run into each other. It's also good physically
to be moving and it's good to change,
change
the serenery, the scenery. And also they say
that sleep also does this as well.
So, having consistent sleep. Even Imam
Shafi'i said,
The wird, the litany of sleep has come
upon me. So, he treated sleep just like
he treated his Hizb.
You know the Quran he would read every
night. He knew that sleep was important
and he would have an intentionality behind sleep.
Right? He knew that he needed to sleep
in order
to be ready to do the other things.
And, you know, the woman mentioned in the
hadith who would,
tie
a rope between two poles and then literally
hold herself up so she can pray, the
prophet
said, what's the point of that? Don't do
that. If you're tired, go to sleep.
And then if you wake up, you can
pray.
So, you know, we don't have Alhamdulillah, we
don't have this sort of
belaboring
sort of approach
to ritual acts of worship. You do them
when you're in a state
to do them.
And if you're not in a state to
do them, if they're voluntary, then you don't
do them and then wait for when you
are in a state to do so. So
sleep can be an Ibadah.
Sleep can be an act of worship. And
when we talk about intentionality, I don't know
if we're going to get to it. We're
not going to get to it tonight, but
next time.
If you have there's many intentions you can
have behind sleep and one of them could
be that renewal, refreshment.
It could be also
Liqa Al Habab.
This is a place where you can meet
all your loved ones. This is a place
where you can meet the Prophet in your
sleep. So there's so many different intentions you
can have
that you can treat sleep as something you
almost look
you know, you look forward to it obviously
after a long day and you want to
rest but
there are things and
kind of spiritual developments that could happen even
while you are asleep.
So,
daily stress relievers. Maybe there's also
certain people you speak to, friends that you
can ring on the phone and,
you know, who who will have have that
kind of effect on you as well.
And then I would also say the 2
most important things in terms
of how we can better organize the time
outside of the 5 prayers
is to concentrate on the 2 bookends.
So that would be the morning, immediately after
waking up,
and your sleep routine or evening,
including the bedtime routine.
So we usually think, oh, bedtime routine like
my children. I'm going to read them a
bedtime story. And then, you know, we pay
so much attention to the children, make sure
they sleep on time and they get the
proper sleep.
But as adults,
I don't see the same level of attention.
People can stay up
watching Netflix or whatever they're doing
on the internet and getting all of this
really unproductive stimulation and then they want to
go to sleep after that and their mind
is in a 1000000 places and it's,
I think
one of
the kind
of lifestyle difficulties people are contending with now
is insomnia and lack of sleep and not
having proper sleep and that sort of thing.
So I think it's
critical. And one way to help with that
is focus on your mornings.
So the first hour
after you wake up is really critical
about how you spend it. And I recommend
to not look at your phone,
not look at your emails, not look at
anything like that, not see what messages you
got even though it's very tempting,
but to
spend it
in meditation,
spend it in Iveda, spend it in vikr
or even spend it in a type of
structured silence,
right, or contemplation.
I think
it will do a lot for you for
the whole rest of the day more than
you can possibly imagine.
And then the evening,
the same thing. There should be a winding
down
period. I recommend for people with children, even
if they don't have children, that there should
be sort of,
you know, like at a certain time we
just stop using phones and technology and all
that, you know, whether it's going to be
9 PM or 8:30 PM or whatever
people decide. Very difficult to do, but you
need to be able to do it yourself
before you then ask the rest of the
family. That's also another thing. So when we
talk about relationships,
you may have now become enlightened to a
different way of life and you're kind of
all gung ho about it, but you can't
really coerce anybody else. So
you have to
show them by example and gently
and nurture them into it rather than say,
okay,
here's the new here's the new deal.
Internet's gonna be turned off at 10 PM
because, actually, I've tried that. It doesn't work.
So,
you have to,
you know, big opposition. So
but you have
to do it in a way to for
people to see, like, okay, that makes sense.
Let's do this together or or let's try
this together rather than like this kind of
coercion
thing.
And once you do that I think Insha'Allah
you will see a lot of benefit with
introducing these small incremental changes
consistently over time
have a much greater cumulative effect
on your well-being than just doing something once
in a big way and then not doing
it after that.
An example they use is the constant drip
will penetrate the rock after some time but
you give it a, you know, a big
roll of the faucet all at once for
20 minutes and do nothing. So,
we have to look at these things
and life as more of a marathon, it's
not a sprint.
So you pace yourself.
And the Prophet
said
Then he mentioned the 3 times.
Right?
So,
no one will be able to
He said the Deen is ease, it's facilitated.
And no one will try to do too
much or try to overcome everything except they
will overcome him.
Faseddidu wakaribu
So, the Tazdeed and the Taqrib means fill
in the gaps as much as you can
and
be approximate. It doesn't have to be exactly
perfect that the way you think it's going
to be.
And then,
Right? And seek aid in these things
by.
Al Ghadwa is the time after fejr until
sunrise,
the critical time as we said.
War Roha which means
sometime that is before Maghrib.
This is called the roha after also before
maghrib.
And then the night, he said something of
the night. Could be the beginning of the
night, could be of the middle of the
night, could be towards the last 6th of
the night. Also there's hadith war that we
had a shayt,
talking about the meritorious nature of the last
6th of the night. There are cosmic connections
to these times of day just like there's
a cosmic connection to Ramadan.
Ramadan is a special time because Allah made
it a special time and the last 6
of the night is a special time because
Allah made it that way. And the Quran
of the Fajr is special because Allah designated
it this way. And so we go in
there with that intention, with that Ihtiseb,
right? Now with Allah
We believe in it
that we do it
We do everything because Allah designated this way
without seeking anything else, not because He's going
to reward us or give you these things
or make things easy but we have enough
of our confidence and uncertainty
in Allah's decree and what he has designated
that it's enough for us to know that
to follow that particular time or to seek
out this particular
time, and so forth.
So, so we've gone into the next hour
so I know people might have some questions.
So I'm gonna stop here
and
we will continue
next time,
with this topic.