How Fasting in Ramadan Helps us Achieve Taqwa #02
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Channel: Yasir Qadhi
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AI Generated Summary ©
The benefits of fasting, including purifying intentions and mastering desires, are discussed. The overarching mechanism of Islam is the reintroduction of the holy month, which is the period of intensive fasting, and achieving taqwa is a natural process that requires constant monitoring and control of behavior. The experience of being a believer and the feeling of peace and sexuality that comes from it are also emphasized. The speaker emphasizes the importance of fasting in empowering individuals to pursue dreams and achieving their potential.AI Generated Transcript ©
Dear Muslims,
last week my khutbah
was about the reality
of
how siyam and fasting
helps us attain taqwa.
When Allah says in the Quran, O you
who believe,
fasting is prescribed for you so that you
may achieve taqwa.
How
does fasting help us achieve taqwa or God
consciousness?
And last week, I went over a number
of points. Of them is sincerity,
ikhlas.
Because what fasting does is it causes you
to purify your intention.
What fasting does, it causes you to be
conscious of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala watching you.
Of them, is that fasting
also helps us with the concept of sabr,
of patience, of restraint.
Of them, is that fasting helps us to
better our akhlaq and interactions with other people.
Today, we're gonna continue from where I left
off last week.
How does fasting
help us achieve the ultimate goal of taqwa?
And we'll mention a few points today.
Of the ways that fasting
allows us to attain taqwa,
is that the essence of taqwa,
the essence of God consciousness,
is to control
one's nafs,
to control
one's desires for the sake of Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala.
This is what taqwa is. Because when you
are faced with 2 choices,
the one of which your nafs, your soul
wants, and the other which is pleasing to
Allah,
taqwa,
necessitates.
You control your own nafs, and you do
what is pleasing to Allah
And therefore,
via the fast,
via
controlling
our daily routine,
we are demonstrating we have the power by
Allah's help to control our nafs. Allah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala
constantly
reminds us in the Qur'an to control our
ego, to control our nafs. Allah says,
O Dawud, We have appointed you to be
a ruler amongst people,
and so judge by what Allah has revealed,
and do not follow your own desires.
If you follow your own desires, fayudillaka
ansabillillah,
it will misguide you away from Allah
The famous khalifa, Umur ibn Abdul Aziz said,
The
is like a man who has been tied
up.
The
is not able to do what his desires
want him to do. That's how he defined
the muttaqih.
The muttaqih is like somebody who's tied up.
Tied up with what? With controlling his desires.
And so you cannot achieve taqwa
without controlling desires. And what does siyam does,
it allows you to
master the controlling of the desires. When we
fast,
we not only control the haram,
we control the halal as well.
What power on earth could possibly cause you
to give up your food and drink, to
not drink cold water in this heat of
Texas?
What power on earth could possibly cause you
to start controlling
your most base human instinct and desire?
It is the power of iman. And what
iman does in this month, we demonstrate to
Allah, and we demonstrate to ourselves
that iman is more precious to us than
what our nafs desires.
Khattada, the famous student of Ibn Abbas said,
if a person does everything his soul desires,
if a person follows every hawa
without letting his taqwa stop him, then he
has taken his desires as his God besides
Allah. Qata'adah is referencing a verse in the
Quran. It's a very powerful verse. Allah says,
Have you seen the one who has worshiped
his own self instead of Allah?
Who worships his self instead of Allah? Qata'adah
said, the one who caves into every desire,
the one who does everything the soul and
body wants,
it is as if that person has worshiped
himself instead of Allah. And so once again,
what does the fasting do? The fasting demonstrates
we have, in English is called willpower.
Willpower.
We have willpower,
and we are dignified. We're not beasts, we're
not animals. We don't just cave in to
every single inclination,
every instinct we have.
And so we prove to ourselves
our nobility
through our humanity,
through our servitude,
through our conquering our desires
for the sake of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
And that is why fasting liberates us. Fasting
is liberating because it allows us to taste
nobility.
We feel, frankly, a sense of being angelic
angels,
because we are literally
overcoming
the most base human instinct of eating and
drinking. And we are literally over coming what
our bodies not just desire, but need.
And we're demonstrating to Allah that Allah
is more precious to us even than our
own physical selves and our bodies. And this
is the height of taqwa.
1 of the hadith of the Prophet shalallahu
alaihi wa sallam said,
reported in sunun ibn Majah, 3 things are
destructive to a person.
3 things are destructive.
And one of them, one of them,
when a man follows his desires.
3 things will destroy you. One of them,
if you allow every desire And by the
way, even outside of Ramadan, this is a
very important topic. O Muslim,
keep your ego and desires in check. Don't
just do everything your soul wants. Don't just
follow every inclination
because that is destructive to yourself. It is
destructive to your spirituality.
It is destructive to your ubudiyyah and servitude
to Allah.
And especially in the month of Ramadan, we
show ourselves we can overcome our desires.
A man came to Hasan al Basri, the
famous scholar of the past, the ascetic scholar,
and said to him, Which jihad is the
best? And at the time there were many
jihads going on. He wanted to know which
battle should I join, which jihad is the
best? Hasan al Basri said, The strongest jihad
is the jihad against your own desires.
The most powerful
jihad is the jihad that you conquer yourself.
And what siyam does, it demonstrates for us
that we're able conquer our own desires. So
of the ways that the siyam and fasting
helps us to achieve taqwa
is that it trains us
to keep our urges,
our animal instincts, and our desires in check,
when we can even control
halal
desires,
when we can control halal urges,
then by Allah, brothers and sisters, can't me
and you will control the haram ones? If
we can control food and drink, then by
Allah we can control that which is haram.
So this is of the ways that fasting
achieves taqwa.
Another mechanism
that fasting helps us attain taqwa,
and it is actually a umbrella number of
points, not just one point. The month of
siyam
reintroduces
us to
so many different rituals
that unfortunately,
many of us neglect, maybe even abandon outside
of the month. Ramadan
reintroduces
we don't take care of our sunan, and
our ra'atib, and our nafil, and in the
month of Ramadan we raise the bar, and
we try our best to do sunan? How
many of us, we rarely come to the
masjid, and Alhamdulillah,
in the month of Ramadan, across the Muslim
world,
every single masjid is packed to capacity.
Alhamdulillah,
the ummah is alive. Alhamdulillah,
the iman is strong in the ummah, especially
in this month of Ramadan.
How many of us, we hardly take the
Quran off of our shelf and open it
up, but in this month, the dust is
pulled off. In this month, the covers are
taken out. In this month, the book is
opened, and tilawah of the Quran is done.
How many of us are so irregular
when it comes to charity? We hardly give
charity. But in this month, we start thinking,
who should I give to? Which family member
is in need? Which charity should I sponsor?
Which orphanage should I give some money to?
Alhamdulillah,
this month, it re kindles
all of the rituals that we should be
doing throughout the year. But in this month,
Alhamdulillah,
we are reintroduced to them. We thank Allah
that the houses of Allah are packed. We
thank Allah, the Quran is recited from every
single mimbar and mihrab. We thank Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala that the rituals are being demonstrated
in this month in a manner that throughout
the year they are not being demonstrated. And
so what happens in this month is that
the rituals of Islam are rediscovered,
and that is of the essence of taqwa.
One other thing we will mention as well
about the reality of taqwa and how siyam
causes us to achieve taqwa. And perhaps, perhaps,
this is the
overarching
mechanism, perhaps this is the queen
of how and why fasting
reintroduces
us to taqwa.
Because
we all need an incentive to do what
we do. We all need an incentive. We
need the carrot in front of us. Why
do you go to work? Because you're gonna
get your paycheck. Why do you do anything
that you do? There is some incentive in
there. What is the incentive
for worshiping Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala? There's plenty
of incentives,
but one of the most powerful incentives
about why we worship Allah
is the feeling
of peace and serenity
that the true believer
tastes
when he or she submits to Allah. In
Arabic, it is called halawatil iman.
In Arabic, it is called the sweetness of
iman.
Now, you know when you taste a real
sweet,
you don't want to eat something that salty
afterwards. Your mouth is feeling nice with that
sweet. When you eat something very precious to
you, you feel so good about this, you
don't want to ruin that taste in your
mouth. Well, what if you taste the ultimate
sweetness of life, which is
the
sweetness of worshiping Allah? What if you can
taste what it feels like to achieve
spiritual tranquility?
You achieve
You achieve
anxieties and the stress that you face are
cast aside,
and you feel a sense of spiritual
happiness
because you have rediscovered what it means to
be a believer? This is
what it means to be a believer.
This is what Ramadan
primarily does. What Ramadan does?
The nobility
of serving Allah,
the exaltedness
of being a worshipper of Allah,
the sweetness of what it means to humble
yourself in front of Allah,
we are reintroduced
to that sweetness.
And because we taste the sweetness of iman,
because we know what it feels like and
how beautiful a feeling it is, Wallahi, our
bodies are tired, our sleep is deprived, the
throat is dry, the voice is cracking.
But inside right now,
how you feel?
You wish you could feel it throughout the
year.
You and I, we both know, we feel
ennobled,
we
feel blessed,
we feel we're doing something.
That feeling
of nobility,
that feeling of tranquility,
that feeling of
of the heart,
that is the essence of taqwa.
This is what taqwa is.
You want to worship Allah because you rediscovered
the nobility of worshiping Allah, the sweetness of
worshiping Allah. And in Ramadan,
every single one of us, without exception,
we taste a little bit of that sweetness.
We taste the reality of, you know, life
is good, living a sinless life, living a
purpose filled, worship filled, Ibadah filled life. It
actually feels good to be a believer, a
mu'min, a Muslim.
And guess what? That feeling of sweetness is
not just in Ramadan. It's not just in
Ramadan. You can feel it throughout the year,
every single day of your life you can
feel it. So what Ramadan does
is that it reminds you of the nobility
of Islam.
It reminds
you, I only created you, O men and
jinn, so that you may worship me. I
don't want any rizq from you. I'm the
one that's gonna give you the rizq, Allah
says in the Quran. And so the height
of taqwa, oh brothers and sisters, the height
of taqwa
is that your soul feels a full sense
of being alive. And that is exactly what
Allah says in the Quran, that he who
worships Allah, the soul becomes alive. The one
who turns to Allah, the soul becomes rekindled.
Allah says, give the example of the one
who was dead,
and We brought him back to life.
Ibn Abbas comments,
Allah is not talking about somebody in the
graveyard whom Allah called back to live in
society.
Allah is talking about somebody who was spiritually
dead,
and then he discovered or rediscovered Islam.
And in rediscovering
Islam,
his soul became
in the Quran.
in the Quran.