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My brothers and sisters, as my brother recited the ayah from the Quran concerning Ramadan, Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala said, Ya ayyuha allatheena amanu kutiba alaykumu sriyamu kama kutiba ala allatheena min qablikum la’allakum tattaqun which as he translated means, O you who believe, fasting has been prescribed upon you as it was prescribed for those before you so that you may become pious, may become more God conscious. It’s very important therefore to understand that fasting like salaah, like prayer for example, and like all the acts of worship in Islam is a tool. It’s a tool to achieve something. It’s not for itself. Salaah for example, prayer is not for itself. Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala said, Inna as-salata tanha anil fahshai wal munkar. The purpose of salaah is to separate you from, to protect you from, to keep you far apart from all forms of sins and all forms of misdeeds and all forms of rebellion and all forms of promiscuity and shamelessness. So if I am praying five times a day and I find I’m still lying and cheating and slandering people and blackbiting and doing all kinds of stuff, then doing drugs and alcohol and God knows what, then obviously I need to check my salaah to say what is wrong with my prayer that it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to do. My prayer is supposed to make me lead a clean life, but my life is still dirty even though I’m praying. So something is wrong with my prayer, right? Take any tool, take absolutely any tool that we use. Every tool has a purpose. The tool is not for itself. You don’t take the tool and you polish it and everything else and keep it nice and safe on top of a shelf. You use the tool, whatever the tool is. And if the tool is not working, then you see the results of that. So I’m, this tool is supposed to do this for me, it’s not doing it, it means there’s something wrong with the tool. I go, I fix the tool. And that’s what we do with our all forms of worship. Salah is to keep us, to help us to lead a life which is clean and pure. Fasting is to help us to become conscious of God, of Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala in every aspect of our lives. It’s not for its, fasting is not a endurance test of how long you can stay without food and water. Fasting is meant to do something and that something is to make us conscious of Allah so that every action of mine, everything that I am going to do before I decide, I will ask myself, is this something which is going to please Allah or not? If it is something that will please Allah, I do it. If it is something that does not please Allah, I will not do it. And if it is something about which I have a doubt, whether this will please Allah or not, I don’t know, then I will not do it until I clarify the doubt and then of course I decide to do it or not to do it. That is the meaning of taqwa. Taqwa is to have this awareness of the presence of Allah in my life. Now that does two major benefits for us. It does two great pieces of good for us. The first thing is that a person of taqwa remains protected from all forms of sin and all forms of disobedience of Allah. Please understand this, in Islam every sin is intrinsically bad. Somebody asked me many years ago, over twenty-five years ago, I was speaking at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and it was a lecture called Introduction to Islam and at the end of that, a lady in the back, she raised her hand and I said, yes please and she said to me, she said, what is the Sharia? Right? Every once in a while you have this thing of saying, America is coming under Sharia law. I mean it won’t happen in a thousand years, let me assure you. But at the same time, people make up these rumors. So somebody said, what is the Sharia? So I said to her, Sharia is the way in which every decent, law-abiding, socially conscious, a person of principles would like to live, period. Even if you remove Islam from it and say forget about Islam, let us just look at the Sharia law itself. It is a law that creates, it is designed to create a society which is based and built on compassion, on mutual help, on honesty, on integrity and so on. And that is the whole meaning of fasting. So it keeps us free from all forms of sins. In Islam as I said, every sin is intrinsically bad. In Islam, alcohol is prohibited. Alcohol is a drug. Alcohol is a chemical that has no business in the human body. But we have created a social system where we say, it’s okay, it’s okay to have a little bit of a drink now and again, it’s nice, I’m celebrating so I’m going to toast your success in champagne. No, Islam says no. Eat well, eat healthy, eat wholesome, alcohol has no place in any of these troubles. All forms of narcotics, there’s nothing good about them. Somebody can pass a law and say that recreational use of marijuana is now fine, it’s legal. My point is, if that is so, there are people here who, like me, have lived in the 60s and 70s, what do you think the hippies were doing in 60s and 70s, marijuana? Recreational use of marijuana, right? What is a pot party? A pot party is where you sit and smoke joints. That’s exactly what they were doing, they’re sitting in jail. How many black African-American youths are sitting in jail on all kinds of felony charges because they were caught with a little bit of marijuana in their pockets? Now it’s legal. Now you’ve got big billboards everywhere. Best cannabis in Massachusetts. This is the problem with man-made laws. Somebody is women fancy, the laws changes. In Islam says no, all narcotics banned. Can I use marijuana under a medical prescription for pain relief? Yes. Then you’re using it as a medicine. But other than that, no, all narcotics banned. Murder banned. Stealing, lying, cheating, slandering, backbiting, practically everything that goes today in our society as our social life banned. Because all those things are intrinsically bad. If you are not a Muslim, a decent human being, even if that person is an atheist, believes in nothing, will not lie, will not cheat, will not slander, I have friends like that who are atheists who I will trust with my life. That’s what Islam is. So being God-conscious keeps you safe from all of these things. Number one benefit. Number two benefit is being conscious of Allah in my life gives me a sense of confidence that nothing in the world can harm me. Nothing in the world can do anything negative to me because I have Allah with me. And that’s why they say don’t complain to Allah about your difficulty, tell your difficulty that I have Allah. Because if God is with me, who can be against me? As one of the great wise people of Islam, one of the great scholars, he said, if a person has everything in life but he does not have Allah, what does he have? And if a person loses everything in life but he has not lost Allah, what has he lost? This is what fasting does. Fasting gives you piety, fasting gives you the sense of the awareness of Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala in our lives. We fast to please Allah, not for anything else. And the result of that is that Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala is with us. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala to help us to be the way that he wants us to be. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala to accept our fasting, to accept our prayer, to accept our devotion and to accept all our supplications. Wasallallahu ala Nabil Kareem wa ala adhi wa sahbihi wa maim.
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