Auto-generated transcript:
My brothers and sisters, tell me what is the number one important thing for you now? Which is your highest priority? Quickly, anybody? Allah, and prayer? Don’t give me a sun-tis-ul-ansar. What is actually your highest priority? Prayer. 100%. Okay, Alhamdulillah, good for you. Anybody else? The Quran, highest priority, 100%. How much of it do you know? One Juz, billion. Highest priority, anybody else? You want to go to Jannah? You have to die first, right? So you are telling me here, and I am seeing the majority of you are college university students, that your university is not important for you, your degree you are working for is not important for you, your careers are not important for you, Allah is important for you, the Quran is important for you, Jannah is important for you. Is this true? If it is true, Alhamdulillah, I am not arguing. If it is true, you are inshallah among the awliya of Allah. But if it is not true, you are lying to yourself. And that is the worst kind of lying. Right? The reason I am asking this is, Allah swt tells us the story of a young boy. And my guess is, in that story Allah does not tell us the age of the boy, but my guess is that this little boy was maybe 10 years old, 10 years, 11 years old or something. And this boy is talking to Allah. He is having a normal conversation with Allah. And from the tone of the conversation it seems that this is not the first time he is doing it. He is not doing it because he is stuck in some trouble, he is asking for help. He is not doing it for… He is a normal, that is how he is. You talk to your friends, you talk to Allah. What is the conversation anybody? Allah swt says, Ibrahim said, Rabbi arini kaifa tuheel mawta. He said, Oh my Rabb, show me how do you bring back somebody to life after they have died? And I say this as a normal conversation because the response to that question is so beautiful and it illustrates a very close relationship which illustrates the fact that this is not the first time this kind of conversation is happening between these two. He says, Rabbi arini kaifa tuheel mawta. He says, Oh my Rabb, show me, can you show me how you bring back to life something which is dead after you have taken the life? So normally what should happen? Allah should say this is how I do it, right? Show it or explain it. But what is the answer? What is Allah saying? You don’t know, you don’t believe that? You don’t believe that? What kind of question is that? From you? All the people, you are asking me this question? What is his answer? He said, of course I believe it. But for the ithbaran of my kalb, show me. So what does Allah do? Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala does not say, okay, here is a chicken, dead chicken, live chicken, I saw how it’s happening. No. Allah gave him a whole project. Allah says to him, get four birds. Imagine, Imam Ali sahab is living in an agrarian society. They have cattle, they have poultry. Allah did not say catch a duck, catch a turkey, no. Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala says find four birds. Raise them, tame them so that they come to you when you call them. He didn’t say catch the birds, put them in cages, no. Just think about that. You know what that means? It means that you first of all have to find four different birds. So he is not saying four sparrows, no. Four different birds. Maybe one of them is a bird of prey, an eagle or a falcon or something. Maybe one of them is some other kind of pisarian bird or you know. If you want to tame a wild bird and have it come to you free flying, no cage, have it come to you when you call it, you have to get that bird at the exact time after it has hatched, before it starts flying. If you get it too young, it will die. You can’t, you can’t, it won’t survive because it eats special food that comes out of the crop of the mother. If you wait too long and it gets its feathers, it will not tame. Exact time. Now you know and I know that different birds have different gestation periods for their eggs. So some birds hatch in 15 days, some birds hatch in 20 days. So four different birds. Then what do you feed them? A sparrow doesn’t eat the same thing as an eagle. So Ibrahim Aleyhissalam is being given his entire project and of course Allah SWT then gives him, because there is no, he can’t go to YouTube and say how do I feed sparrows, no. So Allah is giving him also now, imagine the kind of wild that he must be getting, how to catch sparrows. So Ibrahim Aleyhissalam now, the little boy is given a project where he has to go find different, four different birds, wild birds, feed them, tame them and they come to him. And then Allah SWT says then slaughter them, chop them up and then take from this whole chopped up, means wheat, separate it into parts and put it on different mountain tops. We don’t know how many mountain tops. So Allah is making this thing as complicated as possible, right? And then Allah says you call them and they will come to you, flying. So imagine now these birds, he has chopped them and mixed them all up. So now this head of a sparrow is on this mountain, the tail of the sparrow is on some other mountain, the one leg of the sparrow is on another. Allah SWT wants to show I don’t just bring things back to life, I can bring things back to life in a very complicated way. It can be very complicated for you even to imagine this but for me it is very easy. Unless you call them they will come to you flying in haste. What are we talking about here? And that is my qatira today. We are talking here about the taluk bain al-lum, the taluk bain al-lum, the taluk bain al-lum. We are talking here about the taluk bain Allah wa bain al-abd, the connection between the Rabb and the abd, between you and Allah, between me and Allah. It is a very personal direct connection where I know when I lift my hand and say, Ya Allah, I know my Rabb is listening, not generally listening, listening to me. I know this in the core of my being. Ibrahim Adhem Rahmatul Alay was the king of the kingdom of bulk which is in Afghanistan. So one day his guards brought to him a man and they said to him, Your Majesty, this man was sleeping in your throne room in the main darbar hall. He had his bedding there, he was sleeping there. So Ibrahim Adhem asked him, What are you doing in the throne room? The man said that’s not a throne room, that’s a sarai. You know, sarai in the days of the caravans was a place where at the end of each day’s journey there was this place where people would camp and put their rest, their cattle and what not as well. The man said, This is a sarai. Even Ibrahim said to him, Are you crazy? This is my palace. How is it a sarai? He said, Who lived here before you? He said, My father. He said, Before that? He said, His father, My grandfather. Before that? His father, My great grandfather. He said, When you are dead, who will live here? He said, My son. He said, After him? He said, My son’s son. He said, A place where people come and go is a sarai. No, today you are there, tomorrow somebody else is there, it’s a sarai. Who told you it’s your place? Some time passed and his guards brought to him another man. And this was in the darbar. He was in the throne, he was on the throne, he was sitting there, all his courtiers. And they said, This man, we found him on the roof of the palace. Subhavar they were asking, What are you doing on the roof of my palace? He said, I was searching for my camel. My camel got lost. He said, What kind of crazy man? He said, How will you find your camel on the roof of my palace? He said, The same way you will find Allah sitting on that throne. He said, How will you find the camel, your camel on the roof of my palace? He said, The same way you will find Allah sitting on that throne. Ibrahim Azeem and Abdul Al-Ali got the message. He handed over his kingdom to his son, he left in search of a sheikh. He found a sheikh. The sheikh said to him, He came and he said, Please teach me, I want to connect to Allah. How do I do? Sashkirtu nafs, purifying of my heart. So the sheikh said to him, He showed him a shed, some distance from his house. He said, That is the stable of my hearts. He said, Go there, clean a place, make a place for yourself, stay there and do zikr of Allah subhanawatar at 24 hours. Food will be sent to you once a day. How long? What do I do? Who is the sheikh? So Ibrahim Azeem went there. I don’t know how many of you, has anybody of you, has anybody of you, can anybody ride here, horses? Nobody? You can, you can’t. You can. Have you been inside a stable at any time? Have you mucked out the place and all that? You would have also been right. So Ibrahim Azeem made his bed, cleaned out. That evening when the groom brought the horse back from the grazing grounds, the sheikh said to him, There is a man there in this stable. When you are grooming the horse and cleaning the stable, he said, Throw it in the stable, and you will get a good taste of it. The sheikh said to him, There is a man there in this stable. When you are grooming the horse and cleaning the stable, he said, Throw some dirt on this man. See what’s happening here. This is not, nothing is random here, right? Nothing is random. The man has come, the king has come to the hospital for spiritual illnesses, and the sheikh is the doctor and the sheikh is prescribing for him the cure. There is nothing random happening here. So he said to the, he says to the groom, Throw some dirt on the man. So the groom also knows, this is something that the groom understands. So while he is cleaning and so on, he flicks some dirt. Ibrahim Azeem glares at him. He doesn’t say anything. He understands that this is the king of bulk. Who is a groom? A groom is not even a cockroach as far as he is concerned. He would never have seen a groom. His eyes would not have been violated by looking at a groom. Right? His horse, when he wanted to ride, would be brought to him by his military commander, by the ADC, not by a groom. Here is a groom and he is flicking dirt on him and he is being told to stay in a stable with a horse. Have you ever seen a horse urinating? Go see these things. It is very important. You would understand. I spent my whole life, my entire childhood grooming and riding horses. I used to play polo. If you are sleeping there, you are making your worshipping there and the horse next to you is urinating. Not nice. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That he was not tied to a stake there. He would have walked out any time, right? Who stopped him from walking out? He would have said to himself or he would have gone to the shikh and said, like today is very common for people to say to the shikh, you know what, I don’t like the way you talk. I don’t like this about you. I don’t like that about you tricky one with a shanty. I came here to say, connect me to Allah. You’re making me sit next to a sleep next to a horse, that horse is urinating, defecating, God knows what it is doing and I am supposed to worship in that place which Allah knows even the Tahara of the place whether it is clean or not. What kind of Sheikah? No, he stayed there for 12 years and he did not stay there for 12 years for the love of the horse. He stayed there for 12 years for the love of Allah, Subhanahu wa Ta’ala. He stayed there for 12 years not because anybody made him stay, he stayed there for 12 years because he recognized that the illness, the disease of my heart, the disease of kibur, of takabur, of inflated self-esteem which is taught to every child in this country in the school. Inflated self-esteem. Ya, oh my, wow, man, you are the best. And Omar is 80 years old. Now Omar has reached his peak. He has got nowhere else to go. He is already the best. Now what is going to happen? Major, major violence is done to children in the name of education. One is the name of self-esteem. You inflate the ego of the child where the child thinks that the sun shines out of a dark place in my body. He thinks it is God’s gift to mankind. And the second thing is that they are told that whatever you want is the right thing. Follow your heart. Whatever you want is the right thing. There is no right and wrong. Whatever you want is the right thing. I was told by teachers in West Springfield that a child, little child, 5 year old, 6 year old child can come to the class in the morning and say, today I am a cat. I identify as a cat. So the teachers are supposed to now, they can’t talk to this, meow, meow, meow, how are you? And they give up milk in a saucer to this little cat and the cat licks the milk and that’s not the, the punch line is even better than that. When this cat wants to go to the toilet, there has to be a litter box in the toilet. I am telling you seriously, I am not joking. I am sitting in the house of Allah and I am telling you this. Allah is witness. I was told this by the teachers. Is this education? Is this education? Is this parenting? Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala made you parents and teachers to inflate the egos of children and lie to them that they are the best in the world. You are a good person, mashallah, you can become the best in the world, but that becoming the best in the world is a very long road, takes a lot of time and a lot of pain. Get used to that. The only thing that comes, that waiting for it is death, nothing else. Everything else needs effort. It needs back-breaking effort. It needs tears in the night. Don’t fool yourself. Do not fool yourself. Right? This is what we do. But Ibrahim Azzam was not a fool. Ibrahim Azzam knew what was happening and he said, yes, I know this because my heart, I am a king after all. This ego has to be controlled, ego has to be broken. If it takes 12 years sitting in a stable, that’s what it takes. And Ibrahim Azzam went on to become one of the greatest scholars of this sumba. I want to end with this and say, think about this for yourself. In truth, make the Quran your goal. In truth, make Allah your goal. In truth, make Jannah your goal. Not just to give answers to questions. In truth, which means that your entire life must be geared around that. Salah must be the most important thing in your life and nothing but nothing except death must come in the way of that. The Quran must be the most important thing in your life and nothing but nothing can come in the way of you understanding and memorizing and living your life by the Quran. Right? Then inshallah we ask Allah SWT to open the doors of success for us. We ask Allah SWT to fill our hearts with His Nur. We ask Allah SWT to grant us dhaerat or qadr. We ask Allah SWT to accept our doyars. We ask Allah SWT to use us in the path to guide others and to save us from misguiding ourselves. We ask Allah SWT to save us from our egos. We ask Allah SWT to save us from shaitan. We ask Allah SWT to save us from all the evil influences in the world that we know and that we don’t know. Wasallallahu ala nabil kareem wa ala alihi wa sahbihi ajmaeen bi rahmatika wa arhar wahi min. Tawla wa roska alaykum. Doha. Shia. Does that take? Hold on. Something else is switched up. What do you ask?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (14.7MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | Youtube Music | RSS