Prayer & Presence – Abdal Hakim Murad: Friday Sermon

us each and every one of us in the plural saying o you who have iman seek help in prayer and in sober in fortitude and this is a big difficult thing except for those who have for sure those who know that they are to face their lord and that their returning is to him allah in this verse is offering us help and assistance it's like the red buttons and strings in various places in this building if you press one or pull one maybe some kind of help will arrive this one is let down from heaven and the creator tabaraka ta'ala will never grow angry if we press that red button or if we pull that red string never never in the history of the heavens and the earth has he grown angry with anyone who called upon him he loves to be called upon he is the one who responds this is his nature so what's the nature of this red button he says find help in [Music] he's not saying you must do these things he is saying they will help you this is how you deal with the difficulties of dunya this is how you protect yourself against the harshnesses of these things are there only to help you allah needs no help last week in the khutbah we looked at the beginnings of the great hadith that begins at tahorus purity or purification is half of amen and we saw how it goes on alhamdulillah [Music] the yeah amazing hadith that includes really everything we need to know all the basics are here he has alaihis certain hadiths that are very specific on a particular subject this is how you make tayammum it's a hadith about that but this is one of the hadiths that are called haditha includes so many things it's comprehensive and he says purity is half of religion alhamdulillah fills up the balance the prayer is a light the is a luminosity there's a difference between and nor in arabic which we may speak about they're not the same and the quran is an argument for you or against you so this prayer is a light what does that mean does it mean that if i come into the mosque in the middle of the night when there's no light at all and i start to pray that somehow the light switch goes on no obviously what is being spoken of here is a different kind of light a spiritual light a subtle light the light that is from anor the one who calls himself the light when he says he's the light of the heavens and the earth he doesn't mean that his rays that travel at the speed of light and that are made up of photons and that scientists could think and speculate about no this is a different light the light that in a very mysterious way that may dazzle our brains is about being itself allah is the light of the heavens and the earth is the creator of the heavens and the earth he is the sustainer of the heavens and the earth he is the point of origin and the point of return of the heavens and the earth but he also tells us he is the light of the heavens and the earth who has not been moved to tears when listening to that mysterious and wonderful verse allah is the light of the heavens and the earth it's as though it's saying he is the reality of the heavens and the earth when he creates heaven and earth with the truth it is something like that but clearly this is a mystery just as the light in the heart which the believer experiences is a mystery surgeon's not going to see it if he opens you up it's just a piece of flesh what is this light and why is it connected to the divine name lord which seems to permeate everything in the heavens and the earth something that mysteriously is connected to that mysterious verse and the mind cracks and breaks under this strange paradox because what we know is wherever you turn li turn your face to the sacrosanct mosque but he also says wherever you turn there is his face that's a deep mystery we cannot say that we know what it means except that we know everything that we encounter past present future that we know that we do not know in all of the universes uh is known to him and is what he wills and represents a particular arrangement of his perfect qualities in that time because there's no other creator no other musawa no other khalik no other bad he alone is the author of all nothing can rival him and the prayer is also called a light what does this mean and in many of these verses we find this idea of the red string in prayer and in sabar and it's hard except for the people of hosho so here's another divine support he's telling us how to make this thing easier not only is he offering us these sources of help these help points as we might say nowadays but also guiding us to them and explaining how to make their use as easy as possible subhanallah he says that is the key and what is this that must be there in these two things not just the prayer but in the sabbath and the sabbah is basically every effort that we make to avoid what he does not like and to live according to the beautiful and luminous pattern of life which is shown to us by the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam that requires he is telling us he's given us the clue he's spelling it out for us we don't need to think or speculate or work it out it's there and he says elsewhere but allah the people of iman are successful those who have sure in their prayers the most obvious thing in the world is that if you're praying but inwardly you're not praying you're thinking about your breakfast or you're thinking about how tired you are or you're thinking about catching your train or you're thinking the things that we think if we are honest the mind filling with these insects of distraction even though allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has through the sunnah given us this beautiful outward form which is the best possible way of directing the body to his worship the short that is in the raku and is in the sujour what could be more helpful in assisting us towards this but it's not the same as the inward we can be in sujood and the world can look at us and applaud and say masha allah but maybe the heart is not in sujood maybe the mind is far far far away so this is what he is telling us the prayer and sabha difficult but for the people of hosho so here is another clue if it's difficult the prayer can be difficult getting up at dawn finding time to pray during the day etcetera these difficulties which allah is watching our response to is and it's a kind of five times daily battle for the believer shall we conform to this most beautiful of human practices nothing more beautiful ever in the history of any adam in that time or will we be checking our texts or catching up on sleep or whatever it is that the lower self wants to do five times a day we're given that challenge difficult kabira except for the people of hosho so he's offering us not only an explanation of how to do these things but of how to make them easy to the extent that you are in love with allah subhanahu ta'ala that you love the one who calls himself subhanallah the most beautiful names and we're supposed to love beauty to the extent that you think about him and the mind finds that hard but you recall his perfection and his blessings and the fact that you are from him and from nowhere else and you are returning to him and to nowhere else and that you are under his judgment and scrutiny and under nobody else's in this dunya to that extent and you remember his blessings again and again and again every heartbeat is his gift every breath you take is his gift your children everything gift after gift after gift he does complain about us he says few of my servants are grateful this is true but the best opportunity we have to show our gratitude is the way he has shown us through the holy prophet in that extraordinary night of the mirage which is the salah it is an opportunity to say thank you who is more miserable than the person who snatches a gift doesn't think much about it and doesn't say thank you like a child that takes the sweet and doesn't say thank you to whoever has given the child this is not the way of adults no we are to be shakirin if we have that shukr if we truly love our creator if we love the chosen one to salaam what could be more beloved to us than to worship him at the time he says it's best for us according to the way that his chosen one the best of creation has shown us to be the best thing a human being can ever do what generosity that's the best way of expressing gratitude sometimes we think oh i must say my prayers because this is what we do and i'm afraid of allah's anger that's correct the fear should be real the one whose gifts are ignored has the right to be angry but if we approach him out of love love for what he is for his beautiful names for the blessings that is bestowed upon us for the majesty of his creation for the beauty of it all what is easier than to come to the mosque what is easier than to say another 30 seconds and alhamdulillah i can pray zohar so he says this is hard to translate nobody speaks more beautifully than he does it means something like the coolness of my eye is in the solid in the prayer coolness of one's eye well it means my greatest delight my supreme pleasure of all the pleasures of dunya whatever it's the prayer that he says is what he is about he is muhammad ali his name means the one who is praiseworthy who is given to praise and his name's ahmad mahmood these are all to do with his status as man of praise the one who [Music] guides us to this praise and explains this beautiful way of doing it and alhamdulillah if you think about it it's not it doesn't take long it's not so difficult is a beautiful thing to do people should stay clean and fresh what could be more beautiful who could object to it who in the world could say this is a bad thing to do unambiguous purity goodness the right thing to do at that hour and allah has enumerated the prayers due from each one of us there's a number known to him how many prayers does that person owe from the moment of his shahada or from the moment of his becoming adult to his last breath there's a number known to him we should fulfill that number this is like repaying a debt but subhanallah repaying a debt camp is hard what is more beautiful than this it doesn't cost anything from the things of dunya but instead brings us together in this most beautiful of all practices he says the delight of maya is in prayer so much he did in medina so much he did to change and uplift his people to bring people together reconciliation to bring peace to the warring tribes subhanallah so much he has done for us because but for him we would not be gathered here we need to bless him a lot but of all those things that which he loved most was this simple action of prayer five minutes ten minutes not so much but subhanallah this is the most important practice of his that we need to respect and honor and we need to converse with ourselves about this practice and whether we are honoring it sufficiently the lord of the world has honored us with being he has honored us with the gift of islam and the quran he has honored us with the chosen messenger sallallahu alaihi he has honored us with the gift of the prayer which is carries with it the fragrance of the mirage he has honoured us adam we have ennobled the descendants of adam are we going to honor the commandments by which we give thanks for this enablement or are we going to wander off and look at somebody else's tweets or whatever it is that we think is important at that moment we need to have that conversation with ourselves because the prayer is nothing but purity hygiene outward inward remembrance mindfulness everything about it is good so he loves it and we know that when it was time for the prayer and he chose the man from ethiopia with that beautiful voice and he would say [Music] give us peace bilal and that amazing voice which amongst us would not want to hear just one adhan from subhanallah with that voice of perfect faith the one who is liberated who refused to give way to his slave owners idolatry who was tortured for allah and who enjoyed the love of the chosen ones what faith what purity what beauty must have been in that voice those who heard it their hearts must have melted and they must have experienced this for sure that makes the prayer and the sabbath easier give us peace with it in this world of tumult and fitna tribulation complexity issues we need these times of stillness the time may be our only time when we know that what we are doing is exactly what we should be doing and that can bring extraordinary peace to the heart until we say at the end of it what do we say assalamu alaikum allah so when we have this gratitude for this way of showing gratitude there is an inward peace harmony calm that ensues loves us to give thanks and praise and rewards us with this beautiful inner sense of rightness of serenity of having been in the right place doing the right thing unambiguously hearing the right things saying the right things if only for a few minutes each day we get it right for those times which then go on inshallah to overflow and their fragrance will affect and uplift and transform and rectify other things in our day so that everything in the day is directed towards the qibla so perhaps this is some sense of what he means ali is [Music] the prayer is a light the heart kind of understands what that means it means to be fully connected to the whole symphony of praise in which the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam speaks of four things which are heavy in the balance four things we should be regularly saying is part of our dekker the holy prophet put them in that order and this is a very important dikra for us it begins subhanallah the quran often says subhanallah when we look at creation when we look at allah's wonders and his gift we say subhanallah and this is part of our akida and of our iman but the quran begins with the salah when we stand in the pure place with pure bodies and pure hearts we say alhamdulillah we've said the allahu akbar which means what we know which is that allah is greater than everything else we've been doing the takabir is to remind us that this is more important and then not subhan allah but alhamdulillah there's a difference the ulama say alhamdulillah is higher than subhanallah what does that mean subhanallah is what we say in order to indicate that we know what allah is not we say the quran says glorified is allah transcendent is he above what they associate to him or what they attribute to him he is above that so when we say subhanallah it's because we are affirming that allah is not something he is not associated with the hawaii the things that come and go in this world he's not in things he doesn't have a direction all of those are reader things we say above that transcendent waneza and when we say alhamdulillah we are saying what allah is how do we know the heart will tell us if the heart is sound and if the light is there but the revelation also tells us so we begin the prayer with alhamdulillah praise be to allah lord of the worlds and then the revelation tells us what he is and why we are here and why we are praying and what we are for and our noble destiny praise be to allah lord of the worlds all of that and then when we have affirmed that then of course what do we want to do address him we worship you and again we ask for your help we want him to be on our helper because we're helpless really helpless we live for a few decades we always get sick we always forget things we mess up is there to give us an opportunity to ask for his help to praise him and to worship him and to ask for his help but the precondition of this is the if the mind is elsewhere and these are just words he may respond out of his generosity but he may not so again we come back to this point what is this the believer knows means to be a little bit broken humble in the presence of somebody powerful who can bestow favors it means to be needy to be helped to be helpless on the day of judgment we're told everybody will be really quiet the voices will be quiet because of the all-merciful and you hear only whispering all of the bragging and the shouting and the yelling no sure he is present we know what is happening no more veils for sure that is how we should be and allah also says and perhaps the best way always of understanding these words in the quran is to look at elsewhere in the quran so allah says and when we send the rain the water down upon it it starts to move and shake and grow the miracle of life anywhere wherever you are on earth water is what brings the earth to life so allah here is saying that there is for sure in the earth on its own it's helpless what can it do it's just mud to rob nothingness the lowest thing it requires something so our hearts are to be like that we are supposed to be a little bit broken humbled humble people not full of the ridiculous claim that we are important but we have status that we can strut about that people will point to us all of that is nonsense we'll be rotting away in our graves so that sooner than we like humility be aware be real get real because it's only when you're real and true with yourself that you can really come alive and be an integrated and whole human being and then the water comes what is the water well vikra allah's revelation and then the extraordinary miracle of faith emerges so this humility is important we need to be humble people in order to get all of these blessings from the salat because it's difficult except for the except for the people of hosho this becomes therefore a key human virtue not just one in a long list of fazayas that we need to know but it's absolutely fundamental it's in the heart it is about humility so we ask allah subhanahu ta'ala to unveil to us the beauty of the prayer which is the great gift of the mirage which carries with it something of the fragrance and the dignity and the miracle of that extraordinary night we ask him to give us respect for allah's book which we recite and which is the jewel in the heart of our prayers his speech not ours not that of any human being but god's own speech which in his generosity he is given to this ummah and which we cherish as our most precious jewel in the mihrab and in our ears and on the walls and it's our light it is allah's book but we also know that allah's speech is in some again mentally difficult way uncreated it is part of the infinite world and that is what we come to the mosque to be honored by to hear eternity god's own speech the great mystery there will never be anything in our lives more important than that so may allah give us this give us humility banish from us the stupid vice of pride and help us to be people whose hearts are attack attached to the mosques so that there is nothing in their life they find more healing and more delicious and more important than saying the prayers on time and insha'allah with other luminous hearts may allah give us this virtue of and saba and make us people of salah insha allah and make us people of shukr for our creator blessed is he [Music] on you

Channel: Cambridge Central Mosque

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Length: 32min 22sec (1942 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021