Tahajjud: Waking Soul & Society
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Tahajjud was the lifestyle and the way of the earliest people. I remember when I lived in Damascus and I would look outside my window in the night time before Fajr. And I would look at all the little windows because the buildings were very big and many, many floors. And I felt like there were many windows and each window would either be dark or shine brightly with the light, especially at night. And I would look and think about how many people get up and pray Tahajjud in this day and age. And of course, SubhanAllah, most of the lights were out. And I would think about one of the Tabi'een and what he would say. That the angels look down upon the earth and they see the homes of those who pray Tahajjud as shining stars. Just as we look up at the sky and we see those shining stars and they are lights for us. And think about those who are in, like, go out to the countryside and look at the stars, not from the city. And it used to make me really sad and still does sometimes. When I think about how dark the earth must look today to the angels. So many of the houses are without that light at night. You know, Junaid, someone saw him in a dream after he died. And they asked him, how did it go? How did the questioning go? How are you now? Think about that, to see someone after their death and wonder what was that experience like? And Junaid, if you don't know who he was, he was a person who was known to be a person of great faith, many, many good deeds, great scholarship, great knowledge.
And his answer in the dream was everything has left except for the two raka'as I prayed at night with sincerity. So we want to ask ourselves, are we praying these two raka'as at night with sincerity? Are we building that relationship? Tustari, a mufassir, one who wrote a very beautiful explanation of the Qur'an. And he was three years old. He asked his father, I want to wake up for tahajjud. And his father told him, you're too young. And he said to his father at three, very precocious, precocious three-year-old. He said, OK, but when Allah asks me why I didn't get up, I'm going to say because you didn't teach me, you didn't help me. And so the father started waking him up at three years old. You know, when I first became a Muslim, I was struggling with the farood. I really, it was hard for me to pray each one in its time, to pray dhuhr, to pray asr. Actually, wudu was difficult in those first early days. And I was a Muslim. I had been a Muslim maybe for a month and a half or two months. And I moved in with the most lovely, amazing Malaysian women, Malaysian sisters. And the very first night of prayer was Salat al-'Isha. And my roommate stood up to pray imam for us. And I prayed with her and I took off my, right, we finished praying al-Isha, and I took off my prayer clothes. And she looked at me and she said, are you going to pray dhuhr? And I said, actually, I didn't know what dhuhr was. I had never, ever heard of dhuhr. And this was before Google. So I wasn't able to pull out my phone and look it up or anything like that. And so I was, I went silent. I was also at 18. It was really hard for me to tell people I didn't know things. I liked to be the one who knew everything back then. And so I didn't say anything. I just stared at her.
And then she said, oh, you prayed after tahajjud, don't you? I also had no idea what tahajjud was, but I said, yeah, that's what I do. And so she said, shall I wake you? And I said, yes. SubhanAllah, so she did. And I rushed and tried to look it up in my books that I had and tried to find out what in the world is this thing she's talking about. Alhamdulillah, because of the blessing of living with such amazing young women, I was able to benefit early, early on from this most blessed prayer that really changes lives. SubhanAllah, and really was the way of the early people. You know, Tamim, may Allah be pleased with him, one of the companions of Rasulullah, it is said that once, that once he missed tahajjud, he's known as, you may have heard of him, he's known as the one who lit up the mosque. He was the first one ever to put lanterns or lamps in the masjid. Anyway, one night he missed qiyam al-layl, or he missed tahajjud, and he was so grieved. Now, I want to just slow this story down, because think about what are the things that we grieve. Maybe you grieve if you lose a lot of money in the stock market. Maybe you grieve if there was a house you wanted to buy, but you weren't able to get it. Maybe you, of course we grieve loss of those that we love, and we grieve maybe a grade that we didn't get that we wanted to get, or a paper that we wanted to finish but didn't get finished on time, or a degree that we worked hard for but weren't able to finish, or a degree that we worked hard for but we were late in finishing. These are all the things that we might think about, really spending some time feeling bad about. Now, Tamim, he was so grieved at the loss of one night of prayer that he spent a full year,
a full year after that, praying every night, all night. Subhanallah. You know, I live in Minnesota, and our nights in the summer are very, very, very short, and I'm sure some of you also who live in the northern hemisphere know exactly what I'm talking about. Aisha that comes after 11, Fajr that comes in around 3 a.m., and sometimes in the summer I think, you know, it's just easier to stay up all night so that I can pray Qiyam or Tahajjud. Usually Tahajjud is what we pray. We usually call it Tahajjud if we've prayed it after sleeping, and Qiyam if we pray it without having slept before, but they're interchangeable as well. Anyway, so sometimes I say to myself, oh, you know what, I should just stay up all night, and the whole night is only four hours, and it's not easy. It's not easy to do that, and I think about Tamim, who was not in the northern hemisphere. He wasn't in the northern hemisphere, but yet he made that decision to make up, to make up for the loss of a night of Tahajjud. May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala forgive us for the nights that we slept so deeply that sleep became more important to us than prayer, for the nights we missed out on the opportunity to come close to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, and the nights we missed out on the opportunity to grow in love, to grow in becoming of the beloved at night. Subhanallah. Bilal as well, I mean, we have story after story after story. If you really look at the Seerah carefully, you're going to find that you see the Prophet ﷺ praying at night. We know the famous one, the very famous story of the Prophet ﷺ praying until his feet swelled. How long do you have to stand so that your feet swell? How long does your prayer have to be such that your feet swell? In the famous story, Aisha, she's worried about him, and she says,
Why? Why do you stand so long when you know that your sins are forgiven? And he says, Should I not be a thankful servant, a grateful servant? Standing at night for hours in deep prayer, such that his feet are swelling. What lesson is that for us? Isn't it a lesson that we also should understand that there is deep and great benefit in standing at night? Standing not so our feet swell, that's a difficult thing for most of us to do. Probably if you're standing at night, you might sit as the Prophet ﷺ, when he was walking in the masjid, he found a rope hanging in the masjid, and he said, Whose rope? Who does this rope belong to? And they told him, Ya Rasulullah ﷺ, that rope belongs to Zainab, his wife. His answer was not, What is she doing in the masjid? No, this was normal that she was in the masjid. Just take that and put that on the side and keep that in mind. But rather his answer was, when she's praying at night, and she tires, she holds on to it, so she won't fall over. La ilaha illallah. He said, Take it down, when she's praying and she's tired, let her sit. Now the ulema of hadith have explained this in one of two ways, in two different ways. One is, if you are tired, rest, take a little nap and then come back to the prayer. And others have said, sit, continue the prayer, but sit. Ya Allah, how much do we have to go deeply to understand the benefit and importance of tahajjud? We need to look at Tustari, who at three years old was hoping for this benefit. At Junaid, who after his death was telling us, trying to give us this message, stand at night.
At the Prophet ﷺ, who understood its importance such that his feet swelled. At Zainab, who understood its importance such that she was willing to continue, even though she was so tired, she was afraid she might collapse or fall over. And we are asking ourselves today to put at least, at least a minuscule percentage of that effort into this night prayer, such that we too can grow in the ways of light that our earliest community grew in. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen.
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