Lecture
24 / 84
17
Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
22
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
26
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
29
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
35
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
Personal Accountability in Life and Faith - Sh. Mohammad Elshinawy | Lecture
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. To begin, all praise and glory be to Allah. We thank Him and we seek His help and His guidance and His pleasure and His forgiveness. And we seek protection with Allah from the evil whispers within ourselves and from the consequences of our evil deeds. For whomever Allah guides, this is a great gift that no one can ever take away. And whomever Allah in His perfect justice and perfect wisdom leaves without guidance, none can ever offer guidance to that person. And we testify that no one is worthy of our worship and our devotion and our love and obedience in the absolute sense, but Allah and Allah alone, the creator and maintainer, planner, ponderer, provider, guardian, and supreme king of the heavens and the earth and everything in them and everything between them and everything we know and everything we don't. And we bear witness the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa alihi wa sallam was indeed in truth without doubt, his prophet and his servant and his messenger. Whom Allah sent as a mercy to the worlds. Allah Azza wa Jal calls out from above seven skies and says to us, Oh, you have believed, have the taqwa of Allah, remain mindful of Allah, keep your duty to Allah, keep conscious and obedient to Allah, haqqa tuqatihi, to the extent that he deserves, meaning as best as you possibly can. And do not die, do not leave this life, do not be caught off guard by death, except in a state of complete and total loving and willing surrender to Allah, a state of Islam. To begin, after welcoming my brothers and sisters to the house of Allah Azza wa Jal, let us begin by saying it is from the perfect knowledge of Allah that he knows how forgetful of creatures we are. And it was from his perfect mercy and his complete compassion that he constantly sends us reminders and fuel
so that we don't fall prey to our forgetfulness or to our laziness. So he reminds us and inspires us, educates us and moves us, drives us so that we can arrive and be delivered at him safely. And of the greatest ways he does that are the images he draws for us on almost every page of the Quran regarding the day of judgment. And I wish to begin today's khutbah with sharing one very graphic, very frightening, but at the same time, very empowering image regarding the day of judgment. Wherein Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, he says, وَلَوْ تَرَى إِذِ الظَّالِمُونَ مَوْقُوفُونَ عِنْدَ رَبِّهِمْ If you could only see it, if you could only see that scene, when the wrongdoers are brought, not by choice, are brought to stand in front of their Lord. يَرْجِعُ بَعْضُهُمْ إِلَىٰ بَعْضٍ الْقَوْلِ Each of them talking back and forth with each other. Argument, fierce argument. يَقُولُ الَّذِينَ اَسْتُضْعِفُوا لِلَّذِينَ اَسْتَكْبَرُوا لَوْ لَا أَنْتُمْ لَكُنَّ مُؤْمِنِينَ These wrongdoers are two types. Allah is saying they're arguing. The weak ones are saying to the strong ones, were it not for you, we would have been believers. It's all your fault. Keep in mind, these strong ones here were not oppressors. They did not put guns to their heads. They did not put swords to their necks. Because if it was by force, you know that you're allowed to say, all right, I'm not a Muslim. If your life is on the line, so long as Iman, faith is settled in your heart. The Prophet ﷺ told Ammar, if they torture you again, do it again. You're fine. So in this ayah, when Allah calls them both wrongdoers, the strong are being told by the weak, it's your fault. These weak were not oppressed. These are people that chose to be weak,
chose to be followers, chose to be subordinates, chose to follow in the herd effect, to be like cattle. And then they come on the day of judgment and want to blame their leaders. Whether it's thought leaders, governance leaders, your educators, your influencers, the music made me do it, the media, whatever it is, that's the type of people that are trying to pull the blame game card. They are trying to blame the strong who influenced them for influencing them. The next ayah goes on to say, قَالَ الَّذِينَ اسْتَكْبَرُوا لِلَّذِينَ اسْتُضْعِفُوا أَنَحْنُ صَلَدْنَاكُمْ عَنِ الْهُدَىٰ بَعْدَ إِذْ جَاءَكُمْ بَلْ كُنتُمْ مُجْرِمِينَ The strong will respond to the weak telling them, are you serious? Like are you really saying this? Do you actually believe what you're saying? You're gonna try the playing game. You're gonna try to play victim here. Did we really prevent you from guidance when it came to you? You're acting like you had no say whatsoever. Did we actually totally prevent you from guidance when it came to you? No, you were criminals. You committed the crime of giving up that gift that Allah gave you. You see everything is Allah's will and He gave human beings a share of will, a degree of free will that they're accountable for. So you surrendered it. You gave it to someone else to make your decisions for you, to determine your beliefs and your actions for you. That's a crime for burying that gift of agency, of will that Allah gifted you. You know what this is like? This is like the other ayat in Surah Ibrahim when Allah Azza wa Jal speaks about what some of the early Muslims called the final sermon, the final khutbah that will be given by shaitan. وَقَالَ الشَّيْطَانُ لَمَّا قُضِيَ الْأَمْرُ إِنَّ اللَّهَ وَعَدَكُمْ وَعْدَ الْحَقِّ وَوَعَدْتُكُمْ فَأَخْلَفْتُكُمْ وَمَا كَانَ لِيَ عَلَيْكُمْ مِن سُلْطَانٍ
إِلَّا أَنْ دَعَوْتُكُمْ فَاسْتَجَبْتُمْ لِي فَلَا تَلُومُونِ وَلُومُوا أَنفُسَكُمْ مَا أَنَا بِمُصْرِخِكُمْ وَمَا أَنتُم بِمُصْرِخِيهُمْ shaitan tells them, hey listen, shaitan will say, this is what the verse is telling you, after everything is done, after whoever is in the fire is in the fire, whoever is in paradise is in paradise, after everything has been determined, shaitan will say, Allah promised you the true promise and I gave you a promise and I broke my promise, but I had no authority over you, except that I invited you and you chose to respond to me, so don't blame me, blame yourselves, we're all in it by ourselves, مَا أَنَا بِمُصْرِخِكُمْ then he tells them, I'm not your rescuer who's going to respond to your screams, وَمَا أَنْتُم بِمُصْرِخِيهُمْ nor are you going to respond to my screams and rescue me, everybody's in it on their own, these images are drawn for us, why? For our survival, for our empowerment, especially relevant nowadays, when any people, when they go to a different place in the world, the immigrant population, especially the first and second generation, this is called a survivalist generation by the way, they're either going to make it or they're going to die trying, they're going to either stand strong or they're going to melt and dissolve and evaporate, and so we are that generation, we need to be in survival mode, and we have everything in the Quran we need to be in survival mode. Because at this rate, those that don't wake up, the statistics are saying one third of your children will not be Muslim. We are on the verge of losing our identity. So whomever reads that Quran carefully and says, no, no, no, that is not the excuse that I can pull off on the day of judgment, that is not an excuse I should sell to myself, tell myself I'm a victim, I can't do any better, the waves are too high,
whomever is able to understand that concept is able to take charge of their life, take ownership of their life, realize no, there is some of it in my hands, part of the problem is in my hands, therefore part of the solution is with me as well. I have some sort of control over my life. You know so many times, people after Ramadan, the reason they fall apart is because they feel like there is nothing I can do, Shaytan is going to come and he is going to hijack everything and just I can't help it anymore. And even in marriage, same exact thing, people say I can't, my husband or my wife, it's all their fault. If it's all their fault, you are telling yourself, I can't do any better, there is really nothing to be done, so there is no saving my marriage because there is nothing wrong with me, so I have no say in this. And this is absolutely wrong. When you do all this projection, when you project blame on the opposite party, you know one of the greatest words of advice, my brothers and sisters, that I heard about marriage, a counselor once said to us, all you need to save a marriage is how many people for a good marriage. You think both, he says no, you need one person. You need one person just to start owning up to the fact that I need to change a little bit and stop pointing the finger at the other party, stop being so demanding of the other party. And then I thought for a while, that's absolutely genius. And then I found that our Prophet ﷺ was the first person to say this. Or the earliest person I know to say this. When he said, لا يفرق مؤمن مؤمنة إن كره منها خلقا رضي منها غيره Let no believing man hate a believing woman, meaning his spouse. When he hates one of her qualities, let him love another quality. Meaning it's your problem that you're focusing on the mistake or what you think is the mistake.
Your problem is that you want a perfect spouse and only Allah is perfect. You want something that you think is perfect and you want it immediately, that's your problem. Your problem is that you think it's their job to be exactly to your liking immediately and you're not supposed to settle a little bit. You win some, you lose some. Maybe not everything now, maybe some of it will take a little bit of time. With our children, same exact thing. We like to play victim. How many parents come to me and say, Shaykh, I don't know what to do. My kids, they're not even praying in prayers. ABC's Islam and I'm pulling my hair out. What can I do? And you really feel bad for these parents. Until so many times you discover that this parent does not pray Fajr on time. And so you're telling your child salah is non-negotiable and you don't know why they're not listening and like, I can't do anything else and you're not realizing that you showed them that salah times are negotiable. Or parents come, may Allah protect us and our children, all of them. My child has issues, contemplating suicide or overdosing on, I have no idea where these thoughts came from. You have no idea where these thoughts came from? I did everything I could. I paid tuition, I did this, and I put them maybe in Islamic school and I've done so much for them. I haven't done anything. Really? You didn't put a device. I don't want you to go home and go fight with your kids. But just keep in mind that the music they listen to, the average high schooler hears 5 hours of music a day. All it talks about is sex and music and suicide and murder and getting rich and getting high. That's all it talks about. They're being drilled with 5 hours of this every single day and you were the first access point. And so we need to take charge. There are things in our control. Even on the ummah level, we sit there and speak about this ruler and that scholar and this person and these conspiracy theories
as if none of this has anything to do with us. Why blame the big figures for the disunity in the ummah when we can't get united within one masjid or between 2-3 masajid? Why do we blame these guys who are so selfish, who are having power struggles, you know, for natural resources when we can't even get past our power struggles in our homes? Enough with the blame game. Stop it. The husband and the wife don't know how to get past their tug of war for power. And at times parents come and they lift their hands to me and they say, Shaykh, I've done everything I could and subhanallah, Allah guides whomever He wishes. I can't possibly do anything else. Even Nuh Alayhi Salaam's son left Islam. Right? We tell them wrong. Nuh Alayhi Salaam actually did everything in his power to save his children. And Nuh Alayhi Salaam did not lift his hands from the project until the waves separated between them. And so don't tell yourself you're fine, you could not have done any better and cite the story of Nuh Alayhi Salaam. I'll share with you one final story regarding this issue, this projection of blame. Us not wanting to own our shares of the solutions so that we can pinpoint the problem and nip it in the bud inshaAllah and walk out of this khutbah inshaAllah self-determined. Last Ramadan, a sister called up a Shaykh or someone and she said, last Ramadan, a sister called up a Shaykh or she sent him a message actually. He was reading it and responding online, anonymously of course. She said, Shaykh, Allah will not judge me for what I can't control, right? She said, I have feelings for someone who's not my husband. Allah's not going to punish me for this, right? She wants a Shaykh to validate for her feelings that it's okay.
She said, because I can't control what's in my heart. And the Shaykh gave her a very intelligent answer that can apply to so many scenarios in our lives, including why so many of us doubt Islam in the younger generations. We say, hold on. He said to her, sure, at some level you have no control over your heart, meaning it's not a switch. You can't just change the way you feel. But I want you first to stop putting yourself in a place where you see his face in your newsfeed because the eyes are one of the inlets to the heart that you have control over. And stop putting yourself in gatherings where formality falls and you're having casual, jocative conversations because the ears are another avenue that influence your heart that you have control over. So you have control over what leads to the way you feel at heart. Don't try to absolve yourself and say, I can't do any better. This is the key to owning your tasks. You know, in the story of the very first human beings, it's still our story, the story of Adam, he committed a crime, my brothers and sisters. And Shaytan also committed a crime. What's the difference between Adam and Iblis? Iblis blamed his problem on Allah. Because you misguided me, I'm going to lead them all astray. Adam, peace be upon him, owned his mistake. Right? Oh, our Lord, we wronged ourselves. We messed up. It was our fault. We had no right to do that. And so as a result of how you react to your problems, to your temporary failures, to your challenges, to your sins, whatever it may be. This is what caused Shaytan, because he refused to own his mistakes,
to fall to the lowest of the low. And because Adam, peace be upon him, owned it, it raised him to a level higher than the level he was at before he committed the mistake. So this is what's going to make all the difference. You know what happened to Shaytan, when he refused to own his mistake, when he blamed his problem, his mistake on somebody else? Allah allowed him to believe the lie that he stated. To believe that it wasn't my fault. I'm really not supposed to make sujood, and I'm really better than him, and I'm victimized by Allah who misguided me. Allah allowed him to believe that. So he became blind to his mistake. When he started blaming it on others. Bear with me. And then, Shaytan started blaming others for his mistake. For something he's guilty of. What's he guilty of? Throwing blame on others. Throwing blame on Allah. And then on the day of judgment, you heard the verses earlier, he's going to come to the people and say, you should be blaming yourself, you had more control than that. And by the way, we do this too. We look at other people's problems, someone's kid who falls into a dilemma, or someone's misstep in their religious commitment, and you tell yourself, SubhanAllah, if I was in his shoes, I wouldn't have made that mistake. I could have done better. But then when it comes to your problems, your kid or your deen, you tell yourself, it's okay, I couldn't have done any better. The odds were stacked against me. There's really nothing I could do. And you don't see the inconsistency in that. So the key is to start owning responsibility, taking charge of your life, being grateful for the little bit of control Allah gave you.
لَإِن شَكَرْتُمْ لَأَزِيدَنَّكُمْ Allah said. If you're grateful for this, I will increase you. I'll give you more and more control over where this journey of life takes you. أقول قولي هذا واستغفر الله العظيم لي ولكم I say this and ask Allah's forgiveness for me and you. الحمد لله وحده والصلاة والسلام على من لا نبي بعد I praise Allah alone and the peace and blessings of Allah upon those who have no prophet after him. أشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and that there is no partner for Him. أشهد أن محمدًا عبده ونبيه ورسوله I bear witness that Muhammad is His servant, His Prophet, and His Messenger. Being a person of self-determination, being a person of strong resolve, being a person that doesn't throw their weight on others is essential for people to be productive, to be people of progress, people of contribution in this dunya as well, and more importantly in the akhira. You know in this dunya, interestingly, studies show that millennials, people born in 1984 onwards, on average, a millennial will have three to four careers in their life. As opposed to their parents, the generation before them, they on average have one to two careers in their life. Like forget odd jobs and temporary jobs, just careers, things you invest in, and even if you leave the job itself, you're not leaving the industry, it's your career path. Millennials are more likely to quit a career and start another one, quit a career and start another one. Do you know why that is? They say because millennials have a tendency, a greater tendency, to focus on their rights, not their responsibilities. So they look to be served by others, more so than for them to be responsible to serve others. And so like your parents will put in like $250,000 in your education, and you'll get into your career, and eight months into it, one year into it, you say, listen, I think I made the wrong choice.
Why? Because I don't see myself growing in my career. It's like, hold on, like it's only been a year, like what do you mean? You're waiting for a promotion, you're like, you got to put the work into it. No, no, no, it's not for me. And they throw the whole thing down, and they start on another career path. Why? Because they're waiting for the job. It's the job's fault. It's not gratifying. Not it's my fault, I'm not putting enough work in, I'm not being patient enough. And so this continues to happen in terms of focusing on your rights from others, not your responsibilities from yourselves. But the most dangerous component of this culture is that after a while, you start blaming anyone but yourself on absolutely anything, until it goes up to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Himself. Why does God do this to me? I know a professor from the UK who's involved with many youth that struggle with their faith. And when he sat with this young man, and this young man had the same problems. This is, by the way, the most common, and this falls in line with our subject, by the way. The most common reason why people stop believing in God is because of the problem of evil, problem of why is there suffering in the world. This is the number one reason where in the western world. Because in the western world, people have more privilege, so they feel more entitled, so they're more focused on rights, so they don't want to see any problems at all. Whereas the parts of the world where they have more problems per se, economically, safety, security, this is not the reason why they disbelieve in God. Anyway, so this young man was saying, why is there so much human suffering? Why does God let all this happen? He was following this line of thought. And so as the professor, Dr. Fadil, hafidhahullah, he said to, he was listening, he said, wait a minute, didn't we sit together last year? He said, yeah, we sat last year. He said, and you had the exact same questions. He said, yeah. He said, and I answered all your questions. He said, yeah. He said, and you were satisfied with my answer. He said, yeah, I was satisfied. He said, so what's the problem?
He said, I don't know, they're just bothering me again. And many a times, people that struggle with these issues, we do need to keep this in mind, it's usually an emotional problem, covered with an intellectual shell, right? But deep down inside, it's an emotional problem. So he said, I sat there for a while, and I realized that it was finals week. This kid's under stress. And so every time he has stress in his life, these things start haunting him. Like, why is there stress? Why is there anxiety? Why is there problems in the world? Why is life so hard for everybody? It creeps up on him again. So he said, I called his parents in. And I said to his parents, when he was a baby, and he would bang his head on the table, would you pick him up and say, it's okay baby, bad table, bad table, and you know, strike the table? They said, yeah, yeah, subhanAllah, we used to do that. He said, when he would like get tripped on the prayer rug or something, and he would bump his head, you would pick him up and say, it's okay, bad rug, bad rug? He said, at this point, the parents were just laughing, like, subhanAllah, how'd you know? It's like as if you were there with us. He said, no, I don't need to be there with you. I see the product right in front of me. You taught the child from day one, that if there's anything that goes wrong in life, it's something else's fault. It's somebody else's fault. Instead of telling them, it's okay, alhamdulillah, you're going to be fine, you're not bleeding. Next time we're going to look where we're going, right? So you give them a sense of, I am responsible for, the life has consequences. I am responsible for how things come around. And look how it translates at the end of the day. Who's in control? God? God's to blame for all the problems. But if we were to raise our children the way the Prophet, peace be upon him, raised his daughter, when he said to her, O Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, save yourself from the fire,
for I will not be able to help you in any way. Take your life by the reins. And your children will never learn that from you if it's just talk, until they see you doing it. If we were to raise ourselves on Allah, saying, كل من في السماوات والأرض إلا آتى الرحمن عبده Every single creature in the heavens and the earth will come before Allah as a powerless slave. We all have some degree of power. Allah gave it to us. He's going to take it back on the day of judgment and judge us to the degree of the power he has given us. Hold us accountable for it. لقد أحصاهم وعدهم عد وكلهم آتيه يوم القيامة فرده He has accounted for every last human being and each will walk up to him as an individual. And our Prophet, peace be upon him, in the beautiful hadith in Sahih Muslim, said to us that Allah has said, يا عبادي يا عبادي Oh My servants, إنما هي أعمالكم They are your deeds. They are nothing but your deeds. أحصيها لكم I collect them for you. ثم أوفيكم إياها And then I deliver them straight back to you. فمن وجد خيرا فليحمد الله Whoever finds any good, let them praise Allah for giving you the opportunity, the chance, the power, the agency to do good. ومن وجد غير ذلك فلا يلومن إلا نفسه And whoever finds anything other than that, let him blame no one but himself.
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