# Surah Al-Kawthar & Atomic Habits | Imam Tom Live **Author:** Tom Facchine **Series:** Imam Tom Live **Published:** 2024-11-12 **YouTube:** https://youtu.be/DnLgejpuTBg **URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/surah-al-kawthar-and-atomic-habi-imam-tom-live **Topics:** Culture, Family & Community, Politics & Practical Theology, Social Justice ## Description This week on Imam Tom Weekly, we dive into the rich meanings of Surah Al-Kawthar—a chapter of only three verses, yet profound in its unique language and spiritual depth. Discover the blessings of abundance promised in these verses, alongside our continued journey through Atomic Habits as we explore... ## Transcript **[0:00]** Now we're going to move to tafsir. And if you know about our tafsir segment that we've been going from the short surahs backwards from the back of the Qur'an. And we are both looking at the surah itself. What does it mean? And reflecting on the linguistic miracle of the Qur'an that every single one of the 114 chapters **[0:18]** of the Qur'an has at least one unique word that does not exist in any other chapter. Now that's really remarkable, especially because some of the chapters are extremely short. In fact, the surah that we're going to recite today is the shortest chapter of the Qur'an. It is only three sentences. **[0:35]** And yet, even with this very, very short chapter, there are multiple words that are unique to it that do not exist anywhere else in the Qur'an. And we're going to just look at one of them. So this particular chapter, we'll recite it. **[0:58]** Allah says, we have certainly given you or revealed to you or granted to you al-kawthar. And what is al-kawthar? The literal meaning of al-kawthar is the source of the rivers of paradise. **[1:16]** There are some also potential metaphorical meanings of that as well. Allah says, so pray to your Lord and sacrifice. Nihar refers to Eid al-Adha, the festival or the holiday of the sacrifice, where we follow in Abraham's steps, alayhi as-salam, **[1:33]** in sacrificing an animal for giving in charity. Truly your enemy, he is the one that is cut off. And as you can tell, there's a context behind the revelation of this particular chapter, that the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) had daughters that survived childhood, **[1:52]** but did not have a son that survived childhood. In fact, he had three baby boys in his lifetime. And when the last of them passed away, some of his opponents mocked him. Because as you know, Qurayshi society was a very chauvinistic one. **[2:10]** It was a very masculine supremacist one that they viewed women very badly. And they favored having male sons, having boys, much more than they favored having girls. They were very sad or upset. **[2:25]** Even Allah references this in the Qur'an, that their faces would become dark and gloomy if they were told the news that they were to be having a baby girl. Even some of them went to the extent of burying their baby girls alive. That's infanticide. This was something that was practiced in Arabia, that Islam came to change and to correct and to fix. **[2:42]** And so when the final son of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) died as a baby, one of his enemies came up to him and basically gloating in this fact, said that you're cut off, Muhammad. Nobody's going to remember you. **[2:57]** You're not going to have any lineage. Because the Arabs at that time, they understood as lineage as only having to do with sons and going through the male line. Now, Allah revealed this chapter immediately in response to this claim. That he said, it is certainly your enemy who is cut off rather than you, Muhammad. **[3:19]** And certainly, what is the most popular boy's name in the world right now? And for some time it has been, it is Muhammad. That Allah is giving a reminder that He, the Creator, He is the one that gets to decide people's fates. He is the one that gets to decide whether people are remembered **[3:38]** or whether people are forgotten entirely. And certainly, the person who said this, and I'm intentionally not mentioning his name, the person who was gloating in the face of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) and threatening this sort of threat or trying to make him feel bad for this turn of events, **[3:53]** nobody remembers his name. I mean, in Islamic circles, we know his name, but if you go to any random person on the street, he's forgotten. So there's a turning of the tables here where Allah caused the particular individual who made this, this very mean and insulting remark to be forgotten. **[4:10]** Whereas the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), despite having no male lineage, was not just remembered, but the most remembered of anybody. Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala is Al-Khafid Al-Rafi'. He, two of His names that reflect His activity and the things that He does, **[4:26]** He is able to elevate and He is able to humiliate. He is able to take somebody who is obscure. And we've seen this happen, especially in the last 12 months in Gaza, in Palestine, people who nobody knew existed and they have one striking moment of humanity. **[4:42]** Think of Khadid, right? Think of the other sort of heroes that we've become familiar with, where they were obscure, they were unknown. Nobody knew their names or the fact that they existed. And all of a sudden in one moment, their humanity goes viral. And all of a sudden, everybody is talking about them. **[4:58]** And then you'll have other people who will try very, very hard to do things to make a name for themselves. And they will be completely forgotten. That's up to Allah. We are studying atomic habits. So the last two chapters in the section about making it easy are first, **[5:14]** how to stop procrastinating using the two minute rule. And then the last chapter is how to make good habits inevitable and how to make bad habits impossible. So when it comes to the first one, how to stop procrastinating by using the two minute rule, he gives a very powerful analogy. **[5:30]** He says that habits are like entrance ramps to a highway, meaning that there is a cumulative effect to habits. The choices that you make in the day help set the table or set the stage for the next set of choices that you have to make. **[5:45]** And so there's something of a momentum at play here that if you make a good decision and you start to embark on a good habit, it unlocks the next set of possibilities, which are better than if you had chosen a bad habit. So whether you look back at the end of the day and say, **[6:03]** well, this was a good day or this was a bad day, it often comes down to, well, what were your choices? Did you make an overall good amount of choices or choices for good habits, or did you fall into bad habit and then got really taken down into bad habit after bad habit after bad habit? And this should be familiar to us **[6:19]** when it comes to Muslims, especially how we make our prayers. Think about the type of prayer that you have when you are in a rush, okay? Your meeting went over, there's 10 minutes left in the prayer time. You run into the bathroom, **[6:34]** you splash some water around, you hurry to the prayer rug, you kind of check nervously to see that you haven't missed the time. And then you pray. And let's be honest, that prayer is not your best prayer. It's not your most concentrated prayer compared to if you are able to organize your day **[6:52]** where a half an hour before the prayer is due, you are stepping away from your work or you're stepping away from your duties. You very calmly are able to focus on your purification. You come to the prayer, you are able to do some extra prayers before, **[7:09]** you are doing remembrance of God, you're doing your invocations, and then you're able to step into the prayer. Having done all of that, you know that your prayer is going to be way better, okay? You're going to be way more attentive, way more pious, way more reverent **[7:24]** to the Creator in that prayer. Sometimes we can't help it, okay? There's circumstance, but sometimes we can. Sometimes we do have control and we do have choices. And the choices that you make set the stage for the next set of choices. And so if you're able to do these things, there's a cumulative effect and there's momentum. **[7:41]** When we talk about this phenomenon in habit formation, okay? Sometimes our goals or our habits are too grandiose. They're too big, they're too large. And so it's easy to procrastinate. So for example, if you make your goal, **[7:58]** I want to have an attentive prayer, so I'm going to block out a half an hour for my prayer, okay? That's good, but it might seem like a very big commitment. It might be a little bit daunting. So the key to this technique here, **[8:14]** using the two-minute rule, is to scale it down, make it something that's extremely, extremely manageable. And what you'll find is, because habits have a cumulative effect, just focusing on the very, very first thing, **[8:30]** what he calls a gateway habit, will actually create a cascading effect that will make it easier to follow through with the rest of the habits that you had hoped to do in the first place. So instead of saying that you want to read more at night, **[8:45]** let's make it just read one page a day. It might sound crazy. That might sound like nothing. Like I take this book, let's say you're having a hard time finishing this book, okay? And you've told yourself, well, I need to read a chapter, and I need to read this much. No, just read one page a day, okay? **[9:02]** Do you realize that in a year's time, you'll have read 365 pages, right? That's over, usually most books are not that long. Instead of saying, I'm going to go for a run or a workout tomorrow morning, let's just say you're going to put out your work clothes, and your goal is to change into your work clothes. **[9:19]** What are you going to do in your workout clothes after you change into them? You're just going to go and make eggs or have tea? No, you're going to go work out, right? Now this is called a gateway habit. It is essentially mastering the habit of showing up because most habits don't get ruined **[9:36]** by stopping them in the middle of us doing them. Most habits get ruined by the activation energy that it starts to get into them or start doing it in the first place. This is a very, very good reminder for perfectionists like myself who tend to let perfect **[9:52]** become the enemy of good. If you're really, really struggling with this phenomenon, there's a way to use the two-minute rule to your benefit. So the two-minute rule is a trick, and it's counterintuitive. How does it work? You have to only do two minutes of your habit. **[10:10]** You're actually not allowed to do more, okay? So in extreme circumstances, let's take the Qur'an. I think all of us can practice this at home. Say you've gone some days without reciting Qur'an. Your goal is to recite Qur'an for two minutes, and you have to stop after two minutes. **[10:25]** You're not allowed to go past that. You might be like, well, I can do more. Yes, that's the point. You can do more. We don't want you to do 30 minutes today and nothing tomorrow. Because if you do 30 minutes today and you're not in the habit of doing it, then the next day you're going to say, oh, I can't do my 30 minutes, **[10:41]** and so I might as well not do it. You're going to fall off your habit. So let's stay below, as he says, the point where it feels like work. If it's working out, work out for two minutes. Read Qur'an, read Qur'an for two minutes. **[10:56]** Doing chores or a particular chore that you don't like, do it just for two minutes and then stop. And do it consistently every day for just two minutes until you have built the habit. Remember way back, we talked about how habits are very much about identity. Let's say losing weight. **[11:12]** You want to be a healthy person. Instead of worrying about becoming in shape, you are being the person who doesn't miss workouts. Look at that. Are those workouts two minutes long? Yes, they're two minutes long. If you're able to do this consistently, you will solidify your identity as somebody who doesn't miss workouts, **[11:29]** somebody who sticks to the plan, and you can worry about scaling up the habits later. Now, the next rule, how to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. And he gives a really funny story of Victor Hugo, the famous French author, who was under a deadline to write a book **[11:44]** from his publisher. He was procrastinating like all of us do. So you can feel good because even Victor Hugo is procrastinating. So in order to meet his deadline, I think he had something like six months to turn out a novel. And he hadn't done like anything on it. He took all of his possessions, **[12:00]** all of his clothing, everything, and he turned it over to somebody else to lock it up, to lock it away and take it away from him. And he literally only had a shawl and he stayed in his room continuously for six months without any distractions whatsoever. **[12:16]** And in six months time, he wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame. So that was how sometimes with your habits, you actually have to remove the bad habits or remove the temptation for bad habits. You have to make your bad habits impossible **[12:33]** in order to unlock the inevitability of your good habits. Victor Hugo locking up his possessions would be called a commitment device. A commitment device is a choice that you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. Let's say that you want to eat smaller portions, okay, rather than plate up a huge plate of food **[12:50]** and only eat half of it. Most people don't have the self-control to do that. You use a smaller plate. If you eat off of a smaller plate, you are automatically determining how much food you can eat. If you take the television out of your bedroom, you can't watch it in the bedroom. **[13:07]** So it's a very, very easy fix. You're making choices as a commitment device that is going to help you or it's going to make the bad habit impossible. What this does, it allows you to take advantage of your good intentions and plan for the times where you might fall into temptation **[13:22]** because everybody has good intentions and says early in the morning, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, right? But then when push comes to shove, there's always this little temptation along the way. Oh, I wonder what so-and-so put on social media. Oh, I wonder if there's anything new in the news. Oh, I wonder if anybody messaged me. **[13:38]** And then you check. And when you check, you are opening up a bad habit. And now you've scrolled for 20 minutes and you completely forgot what you were doing. It's not an accident that scrolling is so addictive because it requires zero effort whatsoever. So you basically have to make scrolling **[13:55]** require a ton of effort, right? Shutting down your phone entirely at certain points of the day, extremely, extremely useful. Social commitment devices are really important too. So if you're doing it with other people that if you miss your Qur'an halaqah or something, **[14:11]** you're going to have to face the Shaykh or you're going to have to face your classmate. Your classmate is going to ask you, why weren't you there, right? These types of things are very, very important when it comes to minimize, making your bad habits very, very hard and unlocking your good habits. **[14:28]** So that's all we've got for you this week. I hope everybody is having a good week and they're in good health and good Iman. Inshallah, we hope to see you next time on the program. 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