Surat Al Kahf
Date:
Channel: Nouman Ali Khan
File Size: 15.16MB
AI Generated Transcript ©
nominee lunches right now, just as a reminder, I'm hungry too, but I think it's well worth the way. inshallah with our next speaker he needs no introduction but I will give a shower. The Sultan of Manali, Han is going to be discussing journey to the life story of the youth of the cave.
please settle down.
If we settle down, I can invite him on stage.
Mine is a renowned Arabic teacher. He is a beloved storyteller, and head instructor of Band Aid Institute in Dallas, Texas. So I'm going to go ahead and just invite the southern Manali come to the stage for the seat.
So I'm not going to talk about my topic.
So let you know ahead of time, everybody's okay with that.
It is a wonderful topic. But, you know, these kinds of opportunities, I'd rather get some specific messages across that I think are relevant to us that I don't get to talk about in other forums, which are data. So these 20 minutes, maybe at the most 25 minutes or so that I have, I'm going to talk about just some lessons from the time that I have, I'll just highlight some things. And just discuss something that I feel very strongly are missing in western discourse, especially that has to do with our youth.
The first thing I want to talk about is the cultural onslaught, the first thing we take from the people of the Cave of public art is that they do themselves away from a dominant culture. They pull themselves away, when they saw that it was overwhelmingly evil. And they have no way of escaping that culture. It's actually the vertical given that they were to be executed as a result of their faith. They pull themselves out of that culture. And one of the most important things to draw from that for ourselves is until our life is in danger, we have to engage in societies.
Only when their life was actually threatening that these young men left society that they would do towards a cave, because their actual lives were in danger.
cannot have the attitude that we're not going to engage in society. And somehow everything outside is a fitna, and we have to protect ourselves. And we have to shelter ourselves. And the only way that we're going to keep our faith is if we keep guarding ourselves totally shunning ourselves from the outside world. This is this attitude actually means we've already accepted defeat. Because at the end of the day, that attitude means defense. That attitude means that everybody else is attacking us, and we've got to save ourselves and pull back and, you know, stay strong within our court, etc. But the entire idea of the sun, being the truth, the imagery that a love presents of
Islam, you know, Allah says, you know,
that we heard the truth against false allegations, the image of truth being a weapon, and also being the victim of that weapon running away. And the truth, attacking false and false or being on the run. So who's on the offensive who's on the defense, who's actually questioning the longest happening in society engaging with it and saying, we're here to change things, and who's actually supposed to go into hiding, and supposed to hide behind shelter? That's supposed to be false. So the mentality of
generally, especially as most of you, this is supposed to be, I have to save myself, but actually, I have to engage and I have to help the world become a better place. That's the first thing I want to get across. The second thing I want to get across is a live agent usually does not do this. He usually does not highlight the age of people when he talks about them. He doesn't normally do that. We don't learn the age of lusardi. Sam, when he went to the mountain, we'll learn about that. Very rarely does he do that, like for example, a lot of talks about his hobbies
When he became a mature adult or when use of it some became a mature adult what
their ages are talked about. But usually the people's age is not mentioned, as though it's a non factor.
People became these, the sleepers indicators are called,
even though the sentence is complete, or
without the word 50 of the sentence is completely fine. A lot of those events is no doubt about it, they were in fact,
even the master
wants us to know the age once you're young, because especially when you are young, you are more susceptible to follow the culture around you. You're more susceptible to access the pressures of society, you're more susceptible to wanting to be like everybody else. Why wouldn't you be I mean, it is once you go to high school, that you start feeling the pressure of being different from other people. It's when people start saying things to you that make you feel like man, why am I so different than everybody else. And then you feel the pressure of wanting to dress like to look like the other to talk like the other. You know, even if you're religious, and you know, you want to grow
a beard or something, the pencil thing, you know,
it's a little more, it's a little more,
you know, and we start assimilating ourselves more and more at that age, at a younger age. These young men are highlighted as people who understood their values of their faith, and where the faith and culture clash against each other, and they're going to hold on to their faith no matter what. And as time comes, that they can't even live anymore, but holding on to a slot for them, losing their life. They even live in that society
that society has been chosen over that.
Time to present here his youth are actually the pillars of strength, not the weakness, so many conferences being held about the problems of the youth, for the youth, we have to save our you know that you have to save us
the other way, you guys have to realize the position you're in, you have to realize the responsibility that's set on you. I'm happy to talk about, you know, vision and setting goals. And that's really what I wanted to talk to you about. He said 15 minutes, his vision and setting goals. I am personally offended by most of you who go to college and junior year senior year, majoring in blah, blah, blah, but I'm not sure. I don't know.
You
are going to do accounting, what are you doing? You're
just, I guess,
what is that you have no sense of direction.
acceptable? loosen, you have to have a very clear sense of direction, a very clear sense of purpose. And if you don't have it, you better start working on finding it now, where do you go? And how can you put it to the surface of a magazine. And I say we really high, extremely high incredible opportunity United States. So many, most of us don't have this opportunity that we have here in the United States. I'm talking about what we can do for for rd. And what we can accomplish even in terms of video, and how we can use
it. If we have if we're a people a vision of going to school and going to college is thinking about where they're going to get a job.
How much money they're gonna say, where they getting their first apartment, what their first car is going to be, what are they going to get married, those are the thoughts of everybody else, because that's the highest second thing.
There's anything beyond that, but the loosen, you're the one that has vision.
Purpose says you know, I am a graduate and yes, I will get a job and I will get a place and I will get a car and I will get.
But you know what, I have bigger purpose. I'm going to use my career to do something huge. I have this idea that I could really benefit to
really benefit society, people in general. And I'm going to run with that idea. I'm going to do something towards that. And I'm gonna use my education and my inspiration from these and combine those two things and here's how I'm going to accomplish it. Here's my five year plan. Here's what I see myself doing in 10 years. It was influencing myself doing in 15 years. goals for yourself. target for yourself. You have to assess those. You can't just wait it doesn't work. Let me know
accomplish anything, but the famous
every year, my campus for the students, one of the first things I teach them is
climbing the mountain.
Aim high.
Just want to talk practically about just a couple of groundwork some basic, foundational things that will help you a high in shallow down and help myself aim high. As far as our religious maturity is concerned, every one of us should see ourselves next year, you know, from this salons next Milan, or you know what Ramadan is already over. So this December to next December, this winter, next winter, how am I going to be a better Muslim. And I like to highlight three areas. So for those of you that are writing them down the three areas where you want to be able to save yourself in a tangible way, I'm better off, I've made some progress in three areas, at least the first one of those areas is
worship.
The first concern is worship, has my budget improved, am I living, at least on time perfectly, the guides Am I waking up for further information into the machine. Goal, if you set a goal, if you're gonna accomplish that this year, more and more and more, you're gonna be able to get I'm gonna go to sleep earlier Oh my god, you you can't accomplish anything in life. If you don't go to sleep early. I'm telling you, the conversations you have every night.
Just tell you now,
those he rose to talk because when you wake up at 10am, to pray for you,
you know,
you're going to revive through that is a deep discussion of Lifeline over some showers.
You know, go to sleep on time.
on time, wake up early.
In the morning in
order, we talk about changing the world.
We can either be when you change your day that you can change your year. That means you can change your life. But you start with your day is a daily goal, my mornings have to become more productive in terms of worship. In terms of worship, part of worship, I would include especially those of you that are people who have vision, your vision will come your inspiration will come with the product. And the bar has to be in your heart, you have to have a project of memorizing as much as you can, as little as possible. If you can handle more take on more, but everyday pleasure and a little bit of memorization, and recitation. And that's what starts your day. And I can guarantee you if you do
that in your life, this week, once at once, you will notice a difference the rest of the day, you will
be more accomplished, the doors around your opening opportunities are coming your mind is clear. creative ideas are coming to you if you see
those blessings seal those opens those doors that are otherwise close to the first of how many areas that I say
the first of those areas is worship. That's the first area.
The second area that you really have to work on, that you really have to be concerned with, is knowledge is knowledge. And how am I going to grow in my knowledge this year. And by the way, I separate knowledge from worship, I separate the two because some people focus so much on knowledge and their worship is terrible.
They don't worship, knowledge is compensating them.
So they're studying lots of succeed. And they know a lot of figurines, but they don't even pay attention a lot. I mean, what are you doing? What's another source? You're free, I mentioned these things in priority, the first thing was, versus the second thing is knowledge. And I don't mean become an island and get a DVD. Those of you that want to do that. Congratulations on talking to everybody. Not everybody here is going to be able to do it or whatever. But you have to be educated Muslim, you have to be there seems to be some minimal level of education in your son. And my recommendation for you for that is that by the end of the year, the coming year, you've studied at
least a couple of things, you study the seal the life of the Prophet
once and I used to do it every year once and actually you should read a different source on the CIA every year for the next few years and really study it. So if you take one book, which book you should read on, read all of them. But take one at a time. Take one and go through it one year then goes again to the CIA again, again another year, another year. And you know what, because that is the life of that man. So his army
He's our inspiration. So you have to keep going back to it. That's a part of your education. And it'll give you perspective and it will open doors for for reflection and contemplation for you that city. In and of itself, there are wonderful resources on that available. And I don't think you'll have any trouble finding them in shallow data. At the same time, you have to make substantial gains in that same year, you have to make substantial gains in your
area of knowledge, personal
knowledge, right.
And substantial gains, video for which
this year you're going to try to memorize, I don't know, let's just say. So you shouldn't go for this this year, either memorize.
memorize it, I'm going to succeed, I'm going to read it in translation, I'm going to try to understand every word vocabulary, if there's electricity.
If there's an article in paper,
I'm going to consume it this year for me.
year I don't know if it's a couple of summers a year, but every year you make a substantial gain in your
tangible
Focus, focus on one thing, get it right.
This year I published
something
and
came up with what's more important understanding of memorizing it. So how do you think that those two things are separate? Why do you think
we can repeat it over and over again.
Over and over again, Allah gives us more room to think and reflect more and more when you start seeing things when you recite something 10 times that you didn't see when
you understand it.
And memorizing it is a fundamental piece of understanding it is a fundamental of understanding. So the sooner you're going to study and understand better the the soil you're memorizing. So such things go ahead.
And I talked about
now and one life elective. This is your Islamic semester, for the year for yourself, right? I'll add an elective to this semester. And the elective is at least three or four.
You studied them, memorize them, and they became a part of your day, this is actually combining knowledge and independence, an eternity,
you know,
that you can make a part of your day, now you're combining knowledge with practice, you're combining both of those things. Okay. And actually, each of these three areas of knowledge that I mentioned, and I didn't mention other
other areas of knowledge, I mentioned these three things on purpose, because these three things will make you a better Muslim immediately,
immediately start having a practical impact on your
life.
You know, your love of the prophets, increasing because you're learning about his life every year
is deeper and
deeper.
You're
closer to allow because now you know what you're asking him. You know what you're actually asking him. Now, this is.
So the first thing was worship. And the second thing was knowledge. And I hope you see how I tried to fuse those two things, even though I kept them separate, one is helping the other. So if your knowledge is not helping your worship on unofficial knowledge,
in terms of the in terms of
then there is a third area and that is service,
their service.
And that's where you have to figure out you have to set some time, week, weekends, during the
weekends, whether it is
once a month. Would you like to do some kind of service he helped people help people and that doesn't mean that you necessarily have to do this.
If you want to volunteer at Habitat for Humanity
If
we don't have
good causes or causes and conditions to treat them,
will
cause you to be permanent. And actually, personally, I recommend to be part of good causes found upon five out of the six. So the
opportunity that
it gives us an opportunity to volunteer, help out, be part of something, something you feel passionately about.
Just helped out volunteers today
humblebrag like,
don't do that, do it for yourself, it will make you a better human being
better person, when you do these kinds of and parents,
children, if you can encourage that sort of activity. And even with your teenage kids, it's actually most important in teenage years to engage in the activity of helping other people. That's part of what builds majority, because the teenage years are what are you part of the youth in general,
are the most self absorbed, they're really just a world as themselves and how they look and their friends and their Facebook status, or how many friends they have, or whatever, that becomes really important for them to become very heavy. And if you can pull them out of that mindset at that age, and they can care about things beyond themselves, helping other people seeing what suffering looks like and helping with that, you know, like recently, for example, is a disaster of, you know, the story that head and all those people in New Jersey in New York, and all of this is not too far from you guys, if you do a weekend trip every weekend with sons with the Red Cross or anybody else, and
you want to just help out people whose homes are destroyed, or there's a tree in their driveway or something and just went and health and came back.
I'm telling you bring you closer to a lot like nothing else. You do these three things that your
foundational goals to do great things in life. This is not your goal. These are the these are the things you've met so you can actually achieve those. Now let's talk about your goals.
helped some youth.
Because if you
don't see a doctor in a hospital,
you're gonna run Doctors Without Borders.
You're going to transform the medical industry,
the pharmaceuticals
industry,
getting an MBA to do a business degree and get a job at a blood sucking Corporation.
Get your MBA, be an entrepreneur and start a socially responsible entrepreneurial company that provides a great service to humanity. And at the same time is worth multi multiple millions that give back to the community.
These days, don't think
entrepreneurially thinking creatively, your
people in this audience are of the age right now where you are full of really cool ideas. Your full of really neat ideas. But you know what happens? Your ideas? Yeah, I got this idea for a website. Somebody's awesome.
And you're sitting next to your friend while you're
this website is going to transform the world. And your friend next is Yeah, pretty awesome. But you won't do anything with it.
If you have an idea, work towards it, run with it.
Be entrepreneurial, and do it. Once you graduate from college, or once you finish this event, then you can venture into those things. Do them on your team. do stuff on your team. If you have an idea, run by people that are successful in business or in entrepreneurship, discuss your idea with them, refine it, see how you can get started, and you don't always need to have big investment capital to start something. All you need is a good idea and work ethic and you can start something
and you can be huge. You can be huge
creative entrepreneurs, the few that we have the few entrepreneurs that we have are driving, they're actually shaping the direction of the community.
We have enough doctors,
we have enough programmers. Don't be a programmer to work at a company start your own firm, be connected.
Downloaded app, you should do that. As well, you guys should be
able to do this. You know why? Because we have to understand the new language of power in the world is economics, we have to understand that
even pay for our massages in America, we are some of the most well on the planet. And we have a hard time paying off, we don't even have an economically sustainable model for our own massage with our own schools. That's because we haven't thought big enough. We have to learn to start thinking big. And we have to develop a work ethic for Barca the blessings in God, in that creative work will come with the foundation I talked about is already there. If your salons are good, your verses are solid, your knowledge and your serving humanity, your mind will be in the right place, aka your business, a level
an entrepreneurial venture, and he will not let you become a materialist and a greedy capitalist, he'll make you a socially responsible entrepreneur that will make this country in the world a better place. And we're not just here to serve the oma, we're here to fix the world. You have to think that
don't shortchange yourself. Don't underestimate yourself. And even though we
are
the closest we are to align ourselves the lowest on the ground, that's our humility to Allah. Allah gives you a gift, and a lot of intelligence and a lot of educational opportunity and a login to a creative idea and a lot of gifts, you have the talent and you say, I'm way too humble to exercise my talent. And that is not humility, that is a gratitude.
You have to exercise your talents, you have to be the most of yourself
tells us everybody should work in accordance with your predisposition. Every one of you has a predisposition, you have a talent, you're good at something, find out what that is, and find out how you're going to use it to its maximum potential. So you become a contributor to the world. Now the consumer, everybody else, their own goals, their own bank account, their own savings, their own fashion.
I'm gonna have that kind of house. That's all they think about.
People come out of poverty,
to transform the school systems in my town.
But I want to leave you with a really cool story. I was really inspired by it.
Last week, I met
two weeks ago, actually, I met a brother in New Jersey at the American listen consumer conference.
He's the mayor of Bergen County, New Jersey.
And the mayor of Bergen County.
Young man will actually face
a little, of course, feeling like garbage, because we're listening. And but let me tell you something about how to win the election. When you're clearly Brown.
And you're openly super Muslim.
But he's religious, conservative, etc, etc.
The majority almost 90% is Jewish population in that country. Very heavy, is more synagogue.
twice, sorry.
First time 56% second time 85% of the vote.
Public Service with the belief that I'm here to serve the public.
I have political
views about you know, drone strikes.
But I also will be safe. None of my political views matter when I'm serving public office because I am here to serve you people. So I go to the synagogues. And I go to the businesses and I go to the stores and I go to the offices without the reporters without a press release. I just walk in and say Hey, how's it going? I'm the mayor of this town. How can I make your life better? I'm just here to serve because I want to see the city improve.
And people see that for what it is and I get the vote.
I say man,
I'm gonna do something.
And I'm going to let my work speak for itself. No matter no advertising campaign is not the full advertising campaign. I'm a Muslim, but I'm not crazy.
Please vote for me,
guys. I wasn't
or whatever
he doesn't have to do. His work speaks for himself.
But we're being stereotyped against people, people assume things about
offensive things about us. About Us. It's high time now that our work speaks for itself. Our contribution to society speaks for itself that will shut everybody else up better than anything else. But the actions and the words themselves. I pray that you are the generation that makes us look back and say Mashallah, we did something
we created.
And they will be entrepreneurs and they were the pioneers of the oma to come
and go live happy lives. And when you when you get a sense of vision and direction in your young age, then your youth will be safe, exhausting those energies in the right direction. Otherwise, we'll give people a PlayStation three and Xbox 360s and Facebook and Twitter and that's all your life will amount to. You won't be much after that. You'll just be a consumer, your thing you're looking forward to the next upgrade to the iPhone, get over it.
More important things.
Wonderful speech. Now if we could please hold off on just one second. We do have some things that need to be said. We are breaking for lunch as most people are who are running out the door no
person has mentioned the food location before will we pray at 145 and we need to be back here by too.
long will we see at two o'clock
in order just because of how this is shaped up and where the doors are. We're gonna have some brothers to go first and try to avoid any kind of rush. You can just fall off in the back and shallow