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How do you cope with uncertainty? | Attaching to Allah - Episode 4

We all know that God has promised to test us with loss. And so, our lives can be unpredictable - losing family members, possessions, and most of all: stability. Prophet Ibrahim’s (as) story of being a perpetual refugee gives us some beautiful insights on finding stability in Allah regardless of the unpredictability of life.

Tune in with Dr. Omar Suleiman, Ustadha Sarah Sultan and guests for episode 4 of Attaching to Allah, Yaqeen Institute's 2022 Dhul Hijjah Series.

Download the full list of du'as from the series.

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
And then it just kind of became repetitive right after each other and all of a sudden I thought the floor underneath me was going to drop. And I jumped out of the room and I heard a big crash, a chandelier shaking, and I look into the room and I'm like, okay, nothing fell. What happened? And then it dawned on me it was downstairs where my mom is. So one of the things about Ibrahim alayhis salam is he's the perpetual refugee. And they have that shirt that I've seen, Abraham was a migrant, alayhis salam. Moses was a migrant, alayhis salam. Isa alayhis salam. Jesus was a migrant. Muhammad alayhis salam was a migrant or a refugee, right? Like this idea of connecting to them. Like with Ibrahim alayhis salam, you go from Iraq and then Egypt and then Palestine and then Mecca and then back. And it's not just that, right? With every single move of his, he's leaving behind something as well. Family, stability, possessions, right? There's a story when you start to build a home. Can any of you relate specifically? Do you have a refugee story in your own family or a migration story in your own family where that stability was taken away and it dawned upon you or it dawned upon them this idea that stability is being found
in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala rather than those places? I think for me personally, we've dealt with this quite a bit growing up. My dad was in the government back home in Mali. And it seems like these African countries, there's coups after coups every few years. So this was in the 1990s. There was a coup and so the government was overthrown. I mean, we were living a pretty decent lifestyle. I mean, just overnight, everything changed. They came, they burned down the houses. And we, alhamdulillah, we were able to kind of get out of the house on time. And then we had to leave the country. And this was, you know, we're still pretty young kids. So the middle of the school year, we had to go to a different country and kind of start over, get into the whole different school system. And a few years later, we went back to Mali. You know, things kind of got a little bit stable. And then a few years later again, the same thing happened. You know, another turmoil happens. And then you have the scores of people, populations, cities, villages, just kind of moving out of the country and, you know, moving to Mauritania or Algeria. And some of them are still there. Whenever I go back home and try to visit these places, it's, you know, they live in tents, you know, no water. And, but just a few years before that, they had total safety. And I know this is just not Mali, this is happening all over the world. And it just gives you an appreciation of, you know, just safety. But at the same time,
you always have in the back of your mind, you know, this can all go in one day. And that's kind of my take on that. You know, just looking at Ibrahim moving from one place to the other. And, but again, bringing back to the whole part, you know, things will get better one day. And if it's not in this dunya, inshaAllah, yawm al qiyamah. Allah relates the experience of being a refugee to death. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la says, Walaw anna katabna AAalayhim an ikturu anfusakum wa ikhruju min diyaalikum If we were to prescribe upon them to kill yourselves or to leave your homes. Some of the scholars say, SubhanAllah, to leave your home can be like death. And truly, you look at the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and his companions. And this moment of heartbreak, as amazing as Medina was, it's not Mecca. And the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam turns around and he looks at Mecca and he's very emotional. And he says to Mecca, he's speaking to it, Oh Mecca, innaki ahabbu biladillahi ilayya You are the most beloved of places on earth to me and the most beloved of places on earth to Allah. Had your people, SubhanAllah, he's speaking to Mecca, had your people not run me out, I would have never left you. I would have never left you. And you have Bilal radiAllahu anhu and Abu Bakr radiAllahu ta'ala anhu. I mean, talking about death as soon as they get to Medina, writing poetry about how much they miss Mecca, getting sick, homesick, literally. It's amazing because you then look at, and it matches with the experience when you talk to people who have been through that, like you then look at the emphasis in the Quran on providing warmth to people, to the orphan, to the wayfarer, to that person who's in that experience, that ikram, that honoring of them, the way the Ansar honored the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and the companions. So that they don't feel like a burden, they feel a sense of stability. Your home, your home, welcome home, right? That love that's so necessary. It's not just food and drink.
And in the case of Ibrahim alayhi salam, who's welcoming Ibrahim alayhi salam when he gets to these places? Either a tyrant or nobody, right? He's either being welcomed by a tyrant or, you know, a barren desert. And so he has to find that comfort and that stability only in Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. You know, have any of you ever felt like, when have you felt that Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala gave you stability? When the ground underneath you, you know, in the case of a refugee, literally the ground underneath you changes. You're pulled off of the ground underneath you, but the ground is being pulled from underneath you. Have you ever felt a moment of stability in Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala or anything from the Quran or from the stories of these prophets that really resonates with you in that sense? Two Ramadan's ago, I was upstairs trying to reorganize a room and I started hearing this noise. It was like a tap, tap, tap. And I was like, what is my mom doing downstairs? And she's thinking the same thing downstairs. She's like, what is that noise? And then it just kind of became repetitive right after each other. And all of a sudden, I thought the floor underneath me was going to drop. And I jumped out of the room and I heard a big crash, a chandelier shaking. And I look into the room and I'm like, nothing fell. What happened? And then it dawned on me, it was downstairs where my mom is. And I just ran downstairs. And you know, your mind's going to be flooded with everything wrong and everything bad. And I'm just literally, I have to say, no, no, no out loud just to shut those thoughts out of the way. And I come down and I'm not saying that I'm not trying to belittle what somebody who's been a refugee has experienced, but it looked
like a war-torn space, just dust everywhere. The entire ceiling fell and I couldn't see anything. I couldn't figure out, it did not look like my living room. And I said to my mom, mom, mom, and she's like in a quiet voice, yeah, where are you? She's like, I don't know where you are, but I'm on the couch. Where? And I realized that there is a part of, this is some of the old houses at least have this like double stuffed cement wall and had two plies netted with wire exactly tented over my mom. Everything else, it's broken and in pieces everywhere else. And it's in the perfect shape over my mom. And I get in there and of course I'm scared that, you know, and I get in there and I'm of course I'm scared that more was going to fall. And I wasn't even paying attention. I didn't realize that there were shards of glass all over. I had no idea. And I ran in and I was just struggling trying to tear off the cement and finally took her out and we went and I'm like, like what just, what just happened? SubhanAllah. And that immediacy of not safe to, you know, to being safe was just kind of surreal to this point. I'm still like, I mean, Hamdurillah, it's from Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala that Allah safeguarded her. But this was a very, you know, trying experience for us and it took us a whole year to be able to fix the damage that it happened, which meant that we were living literally in one room the entire year. And so that instability is, it really shakes you. It can rock you in so many,
so many ways that you don't, your functionality is almost kind of like what I was mentioning in the past of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You're only trying to focus on your safety, you know. One of the things from a spiritual perspective that beyond just connecting to those who are refugees in this world, you know, Imam al-Jawzi rahim Allah ta'ala has this really interesting thing. He says that, you know, the believer is homesick for Jannah. You're homesick for paradise. Like if you look at the hadith of the Prophet Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, when he says, be in this world as if you are a stranger or a wayfarer. Kun fi al-dunya ka'anaka gharib, be as if you are a stranger. Ha'abir wa sabir, a wayfarer. You know, and he said that the example of me in this dunya is like a person who just is on a journey and you take a break under a tree. And that idea that, you know, in this dunya, you're never really satisfied. Just like the refugee, no matter what you give them in terms of luxuries or if you give them a nicer house and better accommodations, like objectively speaking, Medina is nicer than Mecca, right? Palm trees versus barren desert, you know. No matter what you give them, it's not home. And the believer always feels that sense of being homesick from Jannah. Like I was not created for this world. I was created for Jannah and aims to get back home and sort of sees this world as merely a pause in that journey. And so any pause within that journey is still just a pause within a pause, as opposed to any semblance of stability, which as believers, we really only seek in the hereafter. So Sister Sara, unpredictability is a part of everybody's life. Maybe not to the extreme of Ibrahim A.I's life, but how do we cope with unpredictability? Unpredictability is something that is inevitable. It's a part of our lives, whether a lot of times
we don't realize that it's a part of our daily lives, but it absolutely is. You know, SubhanAllah, you take the same route on your way to work or school every day, and then one day you're going to a car accident. You know, that unpredictability, we have this misconception that our lives are predictable. If we do the same thing each day, then the same thing will happen. But that's just not the reality of life. And we see it at different stages of our own lives where that fact is amplified. You know, when COVID hit, it was amplified in everybody's lives, the unpredictability. When somebody transplants, it's amplified in everybody's lives. The unpredictability. When somebody transitions from being, you know, from pregnancy to becoming a parent, that unpredictability that then results, you know, the different things that somebody who you love passes away. There's so much unpredictability in our lives. We just don't always expect it. And that's what makes it unpredictable. Well, the story of Ibrahim A.I, and I often think about his wife Hajar, and the unpredictability of, you know, one morning you wake up and your life is as you expect it to be. And then by the end of the day, you're in the middle of a desert with your baby and nothing around you, subhanAllah. Is there anything more unpredictable than that? And that perpetual refugee status that you mentioned that Ibrahim A.I. has. So how do we deal with the inevitable unpredictability in our lives? Number one is to accept the fact that life is unpredictable. And then, you know, and to realize that the Rasul Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam tells us, you tie your camel and you trust in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. And that's the best antidote to deal with unpredictability. Is you do your part. You take every moment as if it's your last moment. You take advantage of five before five, as the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam says, because you have time now, you won't have time later. You have youth now, you won't have youth later. And so doing the most with every moment. And then when things happen
that you can't control, that you just have to accept, how do we do that? Is that's where we trust in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. That we realize that in every single moment, we are already trusting in Him. That we have the air in our lungs that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la allows to come into our lungs. That this is an active trust that we have to have Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. And then finally to, one of the things that I find really helpful is the dhikr of Allahu Akbar, right? That Allah is greater. Allah is greater than what? Allah is greater than everything. Every source of unpredictability that we might be going through. Every difficulty that we might be going through. And to remember that can also be really helpful in dealing with the inevitable unpredictabilities that we're going to face. So do you remember a time where you felt homesick? And have you ever felt homesick for Jannah? Please share with us in the comments below.
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