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Bismillāh ar-Raḥmān ar-Raḥīm. Alhamdulillāhi Rabbil-‘Alameen. Wa salātu wa salāmu ‘alā ash-sharafi al-anbiyā’ wa al-mursaleen, Muḥammadur Rasūlullāh ﷺ, wa ‘alā ālihi wa sahbihi ṣallam. Tasleeman takhtirun kathira. I’m Abadu, my brothers and sisters.
The ultimate reason that people like to accumulate or want to accumulate wealth, the final, ultimate reason, the biggest thrill,
the greatest, you know, reason is to become powerful. How to have a life of power and influence. So money by itself, supposing somebody has, you know, a trillion dollars, but he’s sitting in jail. What’s that title called? Suppose he’s on a life sentence. In jail, he’s never going to come out. He will die in jail. But he has, he owns a trillion dollars. He owns beautiful islands and yachts and, you know, bombardiers, jets, and you name it, all the trappings of luxury. He has all of that. But he himself is imprisoned. And he can never get out. What good is that wealth to him? Right? So, the ultimate, so wealth by itself has no meaning, has no value. The ultimate reason for wealth is to have power. So how to have power? And do you read wealth to have power? And the answer is no.
The best way, the easiest way, the longest lasting way to get power is to be helpful, to help people. Right? The more you help people, the more powerful you will become.
Now, this is something that we tend to ignore, helping others. We live in a world today which has glorified grasping and glorified grabbing for yourself.
Even, even if it is at the expense of others. Just, you know, grab wealth, grab whatever you can get, dog eat dog kind of world, consumerist society where greed has been, instead of being counted as a major sin, which it is, it has become, it has been raised to the level of a virtue. And people think that just accumulating toys is the ultimate purpose of life. So, in this kind of an environment, helping people seems to have been thrown away somewhere by the wayside. And that’s what we need to do. Help people. Hide people’s faults. And become the liḥāf of Allah Subḥānahu wa Ta’ālā, Allah Subḥānahu wa Ta’ālā’s cover. Become Allah’s cover.
Now, the other evil that we have here today is the opposite of this. Instead of hiding people’s faults, our social life, in a lot of cases, consists of uncovering people’s faults, mocking people, making fun of people. So, that is something which is, you know, extremely, extremely harmful.
So, hide people’s faults and become helpful to people. And the way to do that is to add value to others. So, if somebody needs help, you know, what can we do? How can we add value to that?
So, one of the ways in which you can help people by adding value and also in the process add value is to make them self-sufficient. So, there are two ways of helping. One is, you know, give a man a fishing or teach a man how to fish. This is, that’s the principle I’m talking about. Right? So, give the person a way in which they can then add value to themselves. Make them self-sufficient.
Instead of handing out a dole.
Entrepreneurship, for example. You know, setting up a, helping that person set up a business. Helping that person do something which Yeah. becomes a source of income to them. If financial help is what they need. Of course, obviously, financial help is not the only thing people need. People need all kinds of help. And the virtue is in being able to provide that help. But one of the, probably the easiest ways,
the quickest way is to give them financial help in this way. Where we make them self-sufficient. Make them earners. Instead of just taking the money from you and spending it off. I remind myself and you, let us be grateful. Because today, we have lifestyles that are superior, way superior, to the royalty of the West and the East in medieval times. Right? For example, people had palaces. But nobody had hot and cold running water.
People had palaces, but they didn’t have air conditioning.
People had palaces, but they didn’t have central heating. Or even, you know, they had fires in the homes. I mean, in the palaces. But central heating is not just a fire. Central heating is the ability to control that temperature. Increase it or decrease it to the extent you want it. So here is this king who has this, you know, fabulous palace. But he doesn’t have this. Imagine people lived in a time when they didn’t have ice cream. They didn’t have a place where they could get ice cold water. Most people, they didn’t have these things.
Today we live in a, we have lifestyles and today we live in a style which is even better than what I had in the times that I was growing up. So now I’m not talking about medieval times. I’m talking about the late 50s.
60s, 70s even. Even 80s. When I lived in Hyderabad. I was born and raised in Hyderabad. So even when I was in Hyderabad, then I went to Guyana. I lived in Guyana. All those years, the kind of lifestyle I had, conveniences wise. Today people have that and, you know, ten times more than that. My question is, are you conscious of that? Are you aware of that? Are you grateful to Allah ﷻ for that? Because that is the root of being helpful to others. When you are conscious of the help that you received, then it kindles in the heart the desire also to do something good for others.
So very, very important. Now the questions of the grave and the Akhira are a guide to living and decision making in the best possible ways. So if you come to, if you ask yourself and say, what should I focus on? What should I concentrate on? Then think about the questions that we are going to be asked in the Khabar. And then also questions that will be asked in the Akhira, inshaAllah.
And then we ask Allahﷻ to help us to live our life like that. Based on that. For example, a question of the Akhira will be asked is, whether we will,
is, you know, what did we do with our lives?
How did we choose to lead our lives? Now obviously that means that we should focus on the quality of our life, right? What do you do with your time? How do you spend your time? That is a question of the Akhira. So therefore it’s important enough for us to reflect on today. Similarly, we know the questions that Allah ﷻ will ask about the knowledge that we had. Did we live by this knowledge? And did we teach it to somebody? Did we spread this, the goodness of the knowledge? Or did we just keep it for ourselves? Similarly, Allah will ask the question about wealth. Where did we earn it from? And where did we spend it?
Allah will ask questions about our youth. What did we do in our youth? How did we spend our youth? So it is very important to remember these things and say, well, if I want to live a good life, then I need to be aware of these questions. And I need to therefore, you know, live my life in a way that is pleasing to Allah. The key thing to understand, my brothers and sisters, is, for example, the issue of,
people say, you know, instead of fearing Allah, we live lives which are so fearless about the punishment of Allah ﷻ.
Because we are not aware of the cost of failure. You see, if we disobey Allah ﷻ and we are forced, it means we fail in that. Then it means eternal punishment. Unless Allah forgives. And we ask Allah for His forgiveness. But otherwise, it is eternal punishment. Now think about that. See, the perception of risk depends on the cost of failure. For example, if I draw a line on the floor and I tell you, walk on this line, you will do that very easily. Because it is on the floor, just walking along the line is no big deal. But supposing I raise that line up 30 feet in the air. And I say, now walk on that line. Most people will be unable to do that because, you know, they will just be too terrified. Because of the perception of risk, it’s the same line, right? Supposing it
It was only a foot wide, so it is wide enough for you to put your feet safely. But it is 30 feet in the air, so most people will not even attempt it. They say, “No, I can’t take the risk.” If I fall, I’ll break something or, you know, die. So I’m not going to do that. Now compare this question of risk awareness and threat perception with disobeying Allah. What is our threat perception for ourselves when we disobey Allah? Or do we have a threat perception at all? Or has it become so commonplace that we don’t care? That is the thing I remind myself and you: if you really want to live a life of great grace and beauty, then live it with the awareness of the fact that one day we will answer to Allah for whatever we did or chose not to do.
Secondly, as far as what to do is concerned, help people. You want to become humongously successful, you want to become humongously influential; help people. That’s all. If you help people, you can’t go wrong. This is something that I thought, let me check, let me share with you, and remind myself and you. Let us become people who are agents of Allah for the benefit of others. So make this dua and say, “Allah, use me.” When You want to do something good for Your slaves, use me for that. Because You will lose something. So make me that agent, an agent of Your goodness, to spread goodness all around us, all over the world, to stop evil, to stop oppression, no matter who is doing it. This is very, very important. We ask Allah to do this for us, to become the agents of Allah for the spread of goodness all over the world. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon you.