Tahajjud: Waking Soul & Society
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EP. 3: Turning to Tahajjud in Hard Times | Tahajjud: Waking Soul & Society
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. At one of the most dangerous, scary, frightening, anxiety-ridden times of our earliest community, we see the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, standing with his hands raised up in the air in the middle of the night, calling out in tears to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, asking for help. Ali, radiAllahu anhu, said that the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, during Badr, stood up the night before Badr, stood up all night asking Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la for help, pleading for help, while they slept and found rest. Abu Bakr, radiAllahu anhu, we see him in this moment, at this very moment. The Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, is in such intense du'a, intense prayer, that he comes to him and comforts him, that yes, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la will answer your du'a, don't worry. Can we learn? Can we understand that all of the difficulties that we face as a community can be faced with prayer at night? Because this is what we should understand. We should see in his long night of prayer, night of prayer, which Ali, radiAllahu anhu, tells us, that he stood all night. We should see in this that when we stand at the very edges of our difficulties, when we are all together facing a global pandemic, concern for ourselves and concern for our community, when we look around the world and see one community after another struggling, can we remember that it is at night that we should stand and call out to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la.
You know, beautiful things happen at night. We read that Usaid, the companion of Rasulullah, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, radiAllahu anhu, when he would stand at night, the angels would descend to listen to his recitation. In fact, there's one story where he was reading Surat Al-Baqarah, reciting Surat Al-Baqarah, and his horses got agitated. And he would stop reciting and they would calm down. And he would recite again, they would get agitated again. And he got confused and he went to the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, to ask him what that was. And he said it was the angels coming down to listen to his recitation. When you stand at night and pray, imagine, imagine these two things. Imagine first that you are standing as in the footsteps of Rasulullah, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, that you are standing and calling out for help for your own Badr and for our community Badr. And imagine as well that you too have the angels descending to listen to you as you recite and call out. And as you're making dua and thinking about, what am I using this very unique time for? Think about Bilal, radiAllahu anhu, who would stand to call the Adhan. But before that, because he's calling the Adhan al-Fajr, before that, he was standing on the rooftops of one of the homes of Medina before the masjid was built, and making dua, using this time for special dua. Who was he making dua for? Really surprises me every time I read this story. He was making dua for Quraysh. Quraysh, the very tribe that threw the Muslims out, the very tribe that tortured Bilal,
the very tribe that abused him and harmed him because he said, I'm not going to be a Muslim. And he harmed him because he said, ahad, one, I believe in one God. But he loved Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, and Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam loved the Quraysh. And so he prayed for their guidance. Perhaps we also learn from his heart that when we have a heart that makes dua for people, at night, that we are healthy, and we need to be a healthy ummah. That learns how to stand at night and pray. That learns that the strength and power into hajjud is what we need today. We are a community that is doing really good work, mashallah, really good work in activism, in working on changing the fabric of a society that has seen for many years the Muslim as the strange thing. From the time of the Crusades until, and then Orientalism and then Islamophobia, all of these things have tried to box us into a place that was just blatantly not true. And mashallah, our young people, our medium people, and our older people have been working for decades to change that. This is part of that work. Getting up at tahajjud. This was the way of our early community. We want to be the ummah that people say, there go the people that pray at night. There go the people that pray at night and pray for us and pray for themselves. And Imam Shafi'i, may Allah be pleased with him, he would say, the arrow that is shot at night doesn't miss its mark. Believe me, he wasn't talking about archery.
He was talking about dua, that dua is indeed the arrow of the night. That when we stand up to pray at night and we turn to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and we ask not only for the things we need, though these are things to ask for, but also for what we need as a community. We can grow to maqam al-mahmoudah. We can grow to the community that we need to be. All the work that we are doing is important and blessed. That whatever anyone is doing, if someone is working for the betterment of humanity, for the betterment of the ummah, fi sabili Allah, this is all important work. But all of it needs tahajjud. All of it needs tahajjud. And tahajjud will bring us to that place where we are an imitation of Usaid. We are imitation of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And one note, when we're thinking about what we're doing at night, and we're thinking about that prayer, and we're remembering Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam as he stood at night and his feet swelled. I remember Hudhaifa who tells us about the time he prayed with the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and he stood behind him and started to pray with him and the Prophet started with al-baqarah and he said to himself, after 100 rakahs he'll stop. Excuse me, after 100 verses he'll stop. And he kept going. And then he said, okay, at the end of baqarah he'll stop and he kept going. And then he said, at the end of al-amran he'll stop and he kept going. And in surah an-nisa, baqarah, al-amran, surah an-nisa, all three until he said, Allahu akbar, went into ruku'a. And his ruku'a was the same amount of time as his standing. This is the core of the success of the early community, teaching us what prayer is at night. Teaching us what a long, deep communication with our Lord is. I'm certainly not saying that any of us should stand
and the daily as the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did, he had strength from his direct communication, we can say. But certainly we want to try. We want to at least get up for a few short rakahs in imitation of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, put our hands up, raise our hands up, and ask for the Lord's mercy. Ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la to turn our nights into tahajjud, into a time of prayer, such that this prayer can be answered as we work to better ourselves, our families, our communities, our ummah, and the entire world. Allahumma salli wa sallam wa baraka ala Sayyidina Muhammad wal hamdulillahi rabbil alameen.
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