Inspired to Build

is in the quran the stories of several nations that were destroyed and one of those nations was the nation of thamud and thamud was sent the prophet and there are this is one of the few arab nations before the prophet muhammad who's mentioned in the quran with the messenger the other one being and these are actually descendants of each other ad is the more ancient of them and then the mood is descendants of the nation of ahad and what i wanted to talk to you about is the way in which them he tried to invite them back to allah's deen he used a particular gift of allah that allah had given to these people and he used it as an inspiration a motivation for them to be grateful to allah a special talent that these people had so this is mentioned in several places in the quran and i'm going to go through some of them so to first understand what is this gift that these people had that they should be extra grateful for he says you were inheritors after you know the people of ad which were a great empire and after that you people took over and that itself is a gift from allah because once a great nation collapses that its descendants disperse but the fact that you were able to you know gather yourselves and become yet another powerful civilization is a gift from allah on top of that in arabic or in this case is to be able to settle down wherever you want like if somebody decides to move into one area or the other if you have nowadays if you had absolute job security and it didn't matter which city you lived in what state you lived in what country you lived in you get to pick wherever you want to go this is you're doing tabawa and this is actually a description of jannah in the that believers will get to have taboo in jannah the person will get to live wherever they want in jannah okay free free range you you consider all the factors that you want you want the best weather you want the best environment you want the best air quality you want the best schools you take all those things into consideration you make the best choice for yourself that is taboo allah says that these people had tawebo meaning they could they could settle down in any kind of environment and make it the best for themselves and how did they do so he says that you would take the easy manipulable parts of the soil meaning soil can be dug into soil can be you know you can make canals in it and you would take the parts of the soil that's soft and you would build castles out of that soil and even the mountains which are far more rigid harder to access you were able to carve homes out of mountains so the gift that allah is describing to these people is actually their ability to build their ability to develop they can take the earth and turn it into castles they can take mountains and carve homes out of them advanced homes advanced architecture this is an ability that they had and is actually an illustration of you know artistic carving so they weren't just holes like caves they were beautiful designed homes that they were carving artistically inside of mountains similarly other places in the quran allah mentions that you carve homes out of mountains and then the head of this this verb is farihin or the heart of the son of these people fatih actually means that you carve with precision that you cut with precision so you're really really good at what you do you have exact measurements and you build exactly the kind of home you envisioned you know like nowadays we have when you're building something there's architectural plans and then there's research into the geology of the land can can they can this kind of land hold this kind of weight you know what kind of beams and columns are going to be needed what's the material what's the weight what's the pound per square inch kind of thing how much weight can this floor handle how many floors are we going to build this is what we consider standard practice and construction in modern architecture and cities get involved and they check whether or not all these plans are according to city code and all of that before you can build and these are ancient peoples that had an understanding of precise measurement and architecture when they were cutting into a mountain because they would know the difference between if we dig into this part of the mountain the whole thing is going to collapse and this part of the mountain is stable like a column right they had that know-how and uh their prophet calls upon that know-how and invokes that yo you are inspired to have this skill this is not your own you were given this talent from allah and this is one of the reasons you should become grateful now the next step this is actually the this is about this next ayah he said to them my people worship allah there's no one no other god or entity worthy of worship and obedience except he he brought you out from the soil from the earth meaning we're made of dirt so he brought you out from the earth and this is going to be the part that's hard to translate because there's lots of commentary on it but he one way you can look at it is he inspired you to build on it one way to think about wasting is he brought you from the earth and he inspired you to build on it was seek his forgiveness and repent back to him my master certainly is near and answers prayer he responds so in this ayah the the he inspired you to build it fascinated the mufasa siri and people that were studying the quran and contemplating the quran what does allah mean that he inspired these kuffar to build and from it they extracted something very universal human beings unlike other creatures have been given this special gift of creativity and building we have a builder's mindset right we have a creative imaginative mindset we are not like any other species on this planet when it comes to this right birds for millions of years are building a nest the same exact way they don't say i should color coordinate the sticks you know allah created you know different species that survive in different habitats on this earth and they are not going out of their way to advance their habitat in any way it is what the way they're programmed is the way they're programmed and they do it but human beings say yeah you know what this we could make this better this could be this could be cooler or we could when it comes to food we can make this taste better or these colors i wonder if we can produce more colors or this scent maybe i could produce a different kind of scent we have this quest for making things better more advanced more beautiful and constantly developing and developing and developing it's part of what allah put inside the human being it's manifest all around us you know it's not like when human beings figured out how to engage in transportation and put a cart before a bowl or a cart you know cart behind a bowl or a horse they're like well now we don't need to further advance any any no further advancements in transportation are needed right or when we first figured out how to farm early human civilization that there's no more need to advance anything look at in every part that human beings get involved in there's advancement every part every every venture that human beings get involved in there's more development more creativity more advancement and this is something inspired by allah azzawajal himself so some of them fascinated these comments that i'm taking that allah made them capable to build more and more and to advance more and more and allah in fact inspired them how can they build like the idea comes in somebody that you know what i think i have a revolutionary idea i think we can build a canal i think we can build an underwater bridge i think we can do this i can i have an idea for you know new genetics research and allah is actually describing in this ayah that sometimes those ideas are inspired into the minds and hearts of human beings and they are a form of ilham and they come to all human beings one of these from this ayah is allah gives this gift not just to muslims or you know to one group of people all human beings any human being a hindu can have the most revolutionary idea an atheist could have an idea and they're inspired by allah azza to have these creative remarkable ideas to build something incredible okay others went further he in according to this ayah it's as if allah commanded human beings because can have an expectation also so he expected you to develop on the earth he expected you to improve and enhance and build further and further now from that notion what i wanted to to put before all of you is that you know if someone is constantly thinking about the problems they have right in a business for example let me give you a business example so you can understand the point i'm trying to make somebody runs a business they opened up a store right and the the door is making noise or the cash register stopped working or the fridge is malfunctioning in the back or you know the truck the tire went flat or the one employee quit or this lights gone out you know or the delivery never came or the payment didn't come through or the taxes are oh my god so many problems all all the time problem problem problem and when you're constantly thinking about fixing problems and that's all you're doing you're never going to grow your business right because all of your energy it's like if you have a ship all your energy is spent patching up the holes right you can't even think about enhancing the ship or building any better you're just keeping it from sinking right and this can become the mindset this can actually become the mindset of people as a whole as a whole so what happens to entire nations of people entire cultures of people and many muslim cultures are affected by this but not only muslim cultures all you want is for your son or your daughter to get a degree so they can get a job so they can pay the bills that's it let's just keep just maintain so you can have this job and then you'll have stability then just make sure nothing falls apart at least you also and that's a good idea it's a good idea but you know what if everybody's inspired to become an employee to make your boss rich right that's what you're inspired to do i want to become an accountant so i can do accounting count all the money that those people make right i want to become an engineer so i can work for the actual engineering firm you know what we're doing we're teaching we're we're developing entire generations of young people that are learning to become bricks but not learning to become builders we're not getting them to develop and take further steps and this one of the inspirations allah gave us is that we should be the ones that are thinking creatively thinking out of the box thinking big and when you think big in the world of business in the world of science and the world of entrepreneurship whatever field when muslims start thinking big it makes a different impact than when a non-believer starts thinking big why because you know today if you are if you're even slightly attuned to what is happening in the world to the kinds of corruption the kinds of chaos the kinds of war atrocity you know and crime that takes place in the world behind so much of it is big businesses behind so much of the corruption in the world behind even the corrupt politician are rich people that are pushing the politician and they're their fuel and those rich people are rich because they they run and control large business enterprises right and what happens in the world is governments come and go elections come and go presidents come and go parties come and go but that business stays and the business only gets stronger and stronger and stronger that's an institution it's kind of like behind the scenes but it only becomes more and more powerful and more and more institutions more and more entrenched why because they understand something about what development you can hate them all you want you don't have to agree with their worldview their entire world view is the bottom line how do we make more right and if what what the human cost is for making more what the justice cost is for making more they don't care so long as they make more so long as they they hit the next the next milestone but when a when a believer develops the idea of what the quranic term is not the modern arabic term is the mouth by the way interestingly the word is what a tragedy in the arabic language nowadays in modern arabic is used for colonization right to colonize a different country and to rob it of its resources and the quran uses this word in a completely different in a very beautiful way to to actually from like he commanded you he inspired you he made you builders developers so what has to happen what we have to develop is big thinking big ideas and you can't just have big ideas and say i got this great idea i've got this million dollar idx no no no you've got to have the work ethic to back that up you've got to have the grit to back that up and to put to to ready yourself to exhaust yourself if a job costs you 40 hours a week then the i if you really want to build something powerful then 100 hours a week feels like a vacation that's the kind of work ethic a person has to develop to really truly build something in any field in any space and that's the kind of mentality that is needed to bring about real change why because when we read the quran sometimes we have a simplistic view we look at something we don't look at what's going on behind it when allah azzawajal says to the believers spend from what we have provided you the prophet's mission needed people to spend money or needed finances but needed finances right even the hijra from makkah to madina needed what finances and those finances came from believers who were successful in business they were able to do something with what allah had given them and they were able to use it for good this is not a this is not a ted talk about you need to become a millionaire and think about the next million you're going to make that's not what this is but the ummah when we when we look at the chaos around the ummah it's actually the chaos around everywhere in the world it's not just limited to the ummah it actually has to do with those that have been given the inspiration the talent to build business when they become corrupt the world becomes corrupt in fact their corruption becomes the world's corruption and what we need to do is undo that we need to have people inspired by allah's word inspired by the character of their prophet salallahu to to own hospitals to run entire universities we need them to have multi-billion dollar businesses we need that and and they're not doing it because they want to make more and more they want to be an agent of positive change they want to bring about they want to bring education to places that have never seen education some recent times i've been talking about a lot what does allah say about that gave him all kinds of resources and what did he do with his resources he went to places that nobody's ever gone to he discovered people watching like he didn't even expect there's going to be a com there and there's people there and then he goes to a place people don't even speak a language that anybody in his army recognizes almost can't understand anything he's saying what is that telling you when allah gives you resources you become an agent of global change you start going places nobody's ever gone before you start serving people that have never been served before so this is the mindset that allah inspired inside and what what salih was telling his people is that you people have been given such a talent to build such a talent in advanced architecture is what you've been inspired with and you know what allah inspired you to build so now worship allah using that talent wasting your talent away wasting your potential away wasting away the vision that you may have had because you know when you have a big idea if you talk to any any people that have been pioneers in their field any people that have become you know benchmarks of success muslim or non anybody you will see you will have you'll have one thing in common all around them people thought their idea is crazy and the amount of work they're putting in is useless because they had this this thing in their head they knew it works and they put themselves to work and all around them were people who did not believe in their cause or in their work and down the road they're like oh i'm so i'm so proud i know him you were the you and they did not let other people's negativity others people you know they're inspiring them with lack of confidence they didn't allow that to get through to them they developed a thick skin so what i what i really want from young people around the world especially the um you know the majority of the ummah today statistically is between the ages of 18 and 35 or under 35 year old 35 year olds are the majority of the muslim world which means we're just an entirely young ummah almost entirely a young ummah and if we don't learn to think big if we don't think about how to transform the world around us and to really put ourselves to work to identify the talents allah has given us even a prophet is can see in his people this is the talent allah has inspired in you and here you are muslim muslim youth saying i don't know what i'm good at i'm not sure what i should do how are you not sure have you not tried anything maybe that's why you're not sure because you haven't tried anything you haven't done any work you haven't done anything and then you're like i'm not sure what you're you're pretty sure that's saying you're not sure that's what you're good at so how about you go get a job if you if you can't find a fancy job do some work do something learn something learn a skill there's no reason a 16 year old 16 17 year old should be sitting at home there's no reason to go after school go get a job i don't care if you have to change tires or work at a donut shop or or a pizza place or sell shoes i don't care do it you know what you'll learn something you'll learn how a business works you learn how management works you'll learn what it means to respect time and if you don't develop that work ethic at a young age and the only free time you have is going into the the next trophy you're gonna win on a video game a digital token of accomplishment then your life will be a virtual sense of accomplishment you'll never have any real accomplishment in your life step out of your comfort zone push yourself work and you nobody becomes a business person or successful in any entrepreneurial venture and hits the millions without actually going through the grind and learning what it means to do hard work first and that's part of what allah inspired you with you have the talent to do it you have the ability to do it you have the mind to do it you're just not doing it because for some reason you've convinced yourself that sitting back and being comfortable is a good thing maybe you're the reason corruption is winning you're the reason that the world isn't changing the way it is because if you stood up if enough of you stood up if enough of you tried to bring about a change an entire culture changes there's one last piece of thought that i want you to think about we keep complaining about governments being corrupt we complain about politicians being corrupt policies being corrupt the rich and powerful being corrupt society's being corrupt family systems being corrupt culture is being corrupt we see corruption everywhere but you know what when you start creating your own environment when when a gentleman here runs his own mechanic shop when somebody runs their own store when somebody starts their own clinic you know what they're governing it they're governing inside of that place the principles of allah's book the principles of just are being applied and as they grow the influence of what allah has inspired is growing isn't it you're not just sitting in your living room saying this is corrupt and that is corrupt and that is corrupt you created a small circle in which there's no corruption and as you grow as that circle is growing it's inspiring a larger circle of influence where there's no corruption instead of saying oh the medical industry is corrupt well then you know what compete with the medical industry develop a non-corrupt medical industry who's who's stopping you what's stopping you the only thing that's stopping you and me is the limitation we put in our heads so develop this big thinking and remember these words that allah has given to sally salam to even talk to his people and say what's the mara confih i genuinely pray that we get inspired young people that take up powerful ideas that learn that study that work hard from an early age and become models of what it means to develop and bring about real change in the world and to bring inspirational change in the world allah only knows what ideas allah has inspired you with only you and you only you've gotten them right because there's an il ham that comes from allah to everybody about what they can do and accomplish so don't underestimate yourself and let's accomplish incredible things foreign foreign

Channel: Bayyinah Institute

Views: 56,873

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Id: 72Tb68ljEjo

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022