Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alameen. Wasalaatuhu wa Salamu ala sharafil anbiya’i wa al-mursaleen. Muhammadun Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi wa ala alihi wa as-sallam, tasliman kateeran kateeraan. Fumma badhu. My brothers and sisters, in today’s world it is very easy to get distracted and to start believing things about yourself which have no grounding and no roots in reality. For example, you might feel that you are extremely popular and very influential and that you are a great strategic leader and all kinds of things that I hear people saying about themselves or other people saying about them. May Allah have mercy on us and teach us to remain grounded in reality. And that’s why I always quote and remember one of the wise sayings of Imam Shafi’i Rahmatul Ali. He said that when somebody praises you, remember that he is praising the cloak that Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala covered you with. He does not know you. He has not seen you. You are real you. He has not seen your reality. He is reacting to or responding to what he is seeing and what he is seeing is the cloak that Allah has covered you with. Meaning Allah has covered your weaknesses, Allah has covered your evil with his cloak and therefore the person thinks very highly of you. Don’t start believing that. Just thank Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala as alhamdulillah and ask Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala never to remove that cloak so that if it is, so that if people see your actual reality then that landing can be very rough. So it is very important on having said that, it’s important for us to remain grounded as I said and let me therefore teach you some ways of how to remain grounded. So whatever you are, however high you might be flying, ask yourself some questions, some very simple questions and the first of that question is, no matter who you think listens to you, no matter who comes to you for advice, ask the question, are they willing to pay you for that advice? And what’s the evidence? It’s not a question of just saying I’m willing to pay. Have they paid? Can you look at and can you show for yourself? I don’t say show me, you don’t need to show me but do you have invoices and bills to show that people come to you for advice and that they are willing to pay you good money for that advice, number one. Number two, how many people follow your advice? Who follows your advice? Have you tracked anybody to see that you gave some advice and the person followed that advice and then what happened to them? After all our advice is not coming from Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala, nobody is receiving wahi. So no matter what, no matter how good you think your advice is, it’s a good idea to track it to see what happened to the person who was wise enough or foolish enough to follow your advice. Now today we are conditioned and we measure success on the basis of false numbers, followers of social media. There’s a joke somebody sent me once and they said that this guy died and there were three people in his funeral and his mother said, oh, how is this possible? Because he had 3,000 followers on Facebook. Now that is the unfortunate reality. The whole reality is that we live in a make-believe world and we measure our success and we feel good on the basis of these false numbers. We think people are listening to us. It’s a mutual, you scratch my back, I scratch yours kind of thing. So if one is it’s of course also promoted by the algorithm, whatever you like, you see more of that. And secondly, if you like something, somebody’s comment, then that person likes your comment and so on, actually has no meaning. So therefore false numbers. Now just analyze that on the basis of engagement and the number will get reduced to single digits. For example, if you are looking at the number of views on your channel, you might have 10,000 views. But then look at the engagement for example, if you had a 30-minute lecture, how many people listen to that lecture for 30 minutes? Because as far as the algorithm is concerned, as far as the machine is concerned, as long as a person clicks on that link, even if they were there for one second, it will still count it as one view. But if you are talking about something and it took you, that lecture was half an hour, how many people stayed for half an hour? And literally it will get reduced, your number will get reduced to single digits. As I said, social media caters to the LCD, the lowest common denominator of humanity. People without focus, without goals, with the attention spans of monkeys who cannot concentrate on anything, who have no staying power, who are looking for constant external stimulation to which they react exactly as their handlers want them to. Having a large number of them as followers means that what you are creating pleases them. Now what does that tell you about how you are spending your time? Because if you are spending your time creating content for people like that with the attention span of monkeys and goldfish, you know, a couple of seconds, couple of minutes, then what does it say about the value of your time? So therefore, ask yourself a very good question, which is if you want to see what your life, the direction in which your life is going, and if you want to assess that and say is it a good direction or not, ask yourself this question and say, am I getting tawfiq? Am I getting guidance of Allah subhanahu ta’ala to do good deeds or not? Am I getting the guidance of Allah to do good deeds or not? The Sahaba asked Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, how do I know if my Salah is accepted? And he said if your Salah is accepted, Allah will give you the tawfiq to do the next Salah. So if I pray Salatul Fajr and I want to know whether my Salatul Fajr is accepted, then inshallah, if you then pray Salatul Zuhur and you find that, then it means that inshallah your Salatul Fajr was accepted because Allah gave you the tawfiq to pray the next Salah. And similarly for other things, if I have given money, if I have spent in charity, am I getting the tawfiq to do more? Do I feel happy doing that or do I see it as a burden and so on? Allah subhanahu ta’ala said in Suratul An’am, Allah said, whoever Allah wishes to guide, he opens their heart to Islam. So if Allah subhanahu ta’ala wishes good for us, Allah will open our heart to Islam. But whoever Allah wills to leave astray, he makes their chest tight and constricted as if they had been climbing up into the sky, flying up into the sky. This is how Allah dooms those who disbelieve. This is how Allah subhanahu ta’ala punishes those who disbelieve. Now think about this, on a side note, this ayat came in the 7th century where whatever else people may have been doing, they certainly weren’t flying. So no one had any clue what happens to you when you go up in the air. And going up in the air, and chest being tight and constricted, breathing being constricted, doesn’t even happen when you just fly a couple of hundred feet up in the air. You have to go some serious heights for that to happen. So think about this, this is one of the many places for those who are looking for proofs of the divine nature of the Quran. This is one of the many places which shows that only Allah knows. So Allah here says, whoever Allah wishes to guide, he opens his heart to Islam. So first question, ask yourself, is my lifestyle such that I am doing more and more of obedience to Allah or disobedience to Allah? If Allah has given me money and I’m spending that money doing haram, or if I’m earning that money and haram, then the answer is very simple. My life, Allah is not taking me towards himself and I need to change myself, otherwise I’m likely to be left with those who Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala pushes away from himself because they have chosen that for themselves. So if we are getting tawfir to do more and more good deeds, alhamdulillah we are on the right path, we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala for istighawat, we ask Allah for steadfastness. If we find that in our lives we are disobeying Allah more, Allah has given us resources and those resources we use to disobey Allah. Think about that, how much of, that’s the reason why Rasulullah said every woman should be disobeying Allah. Rasulullah said every ummah has a test and he said the test of my ummah is wealth. And so on and so on. If you look at the Muslims, whether it is at the individual level, whether it’s at the collective level, whether it’s at the level of people who are earning two digit or three digit salaries, or people who are earning ten digit salaries or ten digit incomes every minute, the millionaires, the billionaires, the trillionaires, see where their life takes them. See what kind of decisions they are making. And then look at yourself. Don’t worry about what the king of this or that country is doing. Look at yourself and say what am I doing? So if Allah has given me money and I am using that money to disobey Allah, I am using that money for haram. Believe me, Allah also told us what happens. Allah said, same surah of the Quran. Allah said when they became oblivious to warnings, Allah says, you are doing haram, people are warning you, people are telling you, you pay no attention, you say I don’t care. Please go ahead. No problem. It’s your life. Allah says when they became oblivious to warnings, we showered them with everything they desired. Allah said we opened on them the doors of everything. But just as they became engrossed in that, they were delighted in indulging in all that Allah had opened the doors for them. So they wanted to disobey Allah. Allah said go ahead, disobey someone. Allah said we seized them by surprise. They were suddenly by surprise. For Iza whom movil is un, and they instantly fell into despair. They fell into despair because now they realized that we have to go before Allah. Now what happens? And this is where we need to ask ourselves because the whole point is it’s not a question of of what I believe or don’t believe. As I said yesterday, you can believe anything you like. You can believe the truth or you can believe falsehood. You can believe whatever you want. But only the truth will happen. Falsehood will not happen. Falsehood will not happen. Only the truth will happen. And if you want to believe something which is not true, of course you are free. Everybody is free. But it is not going to happen. And what is the truth will happen. Then what do you do? So it’s very important, very simple way. Look at yourself. Let me look at my life. You look at your life and ask yourself, what is the truth? Let me look at my life. You look at your life and ask yourself, and ask myself, am I disobeying Allah? If the answer is yes, then that must stop instantly, immediately, right now because I may die right now. And once we see malakur mouth, once we see the signs of Allah, once we see our life, in the sense of once we see the akhirah, then the door of tawbah would be shut. We ask Allah SWT to open our eyes before our eyes are opened for us by malakur mouth.
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