 Alhamdulillah, Allah SWT says in the Qur'an Allah has given you the prescription of fasting Just as He prescribed it for the peoples before us All of the previous religious traditions had some element of fasting in their tradition The Christians used to fast for 40 days The Jews also had fasting And Allah SWT gave us fasting And then He gives us the reason, it's called When Allah tells you why He's doing something In order that you learn piety This is one of the most important elements of fasting Is to learn piety and from piety is sabr And that's why Ramadan is the month of patience It's learning to be patient Allah SWT also says The command that He gives in al-Baqarah Is that He created us And those that were before us And then He told us to worship Him That we might be pious That we might learn this taqwa And so Ramadan is a madrasah It's a school, it's like continuing education That you go back to, like a physician Or anybody that's in a type of practice That needs the skills to be upgraded, enhanced Ramadan is the yearly time That we return to this school of taqwa And of sabr The Jumu'a is the weekly time The prayers are the daily time That we return, we realign ourselves with the Divine Human beings are in heedlessness Allah SWT says You laugh and you're in a state of heedlessness That you forget your Lord This is one of the deepest illnesses of the human being Imam al-Junaid when he was asked What he thought the foundational sin of the human being was He said that it was ghafla It was heedlessness because all sins emanate from heedlessness But there's another reason why Allah SWT gave us this practice of fasting In the verses that follow Allah SWT says First of all, Ayam is called It's a plural of pausity It's a plural that indicates that there is not much of it Like amwal Because wealth, mal, there's not much of wealth People don't have a lot of wealth So amwal is the plural of wealth To indicate that wealth is something that is limited Ayyamin Ma'adu, that's limited days You have a few days And then Or on a journey But you can make up those days if you were sick or traveling That if you're able to do it Then you can give fidya So you pay That was abrogated by the verses that follow So people used to be able to do fidya If they were wealthy, they could do fidya But that was removed And everybody has to fast Unless you're sick And then you can do fidya for that But other than that, everybody has to fast So Allah SWT said About this Fidya And whoever does extra This is better for him Again, those were abrogated But they still apply to nafila fasting You draw near to your lord with nafila With extra acts Until Allah loves you And so fasting is one of the ways Three months Three days out of the month It was the practice of the Prophet SAW Some of the Sahaba practiced the fast of Dawud Which was every other day Some practiced Monday and Thursday But the Prophet himself His practice was three The three days of the white day The white days So the fasting woman And you do fast for her But the fast is better for you That's if you have a choice Like if you're traveling It's better to fast Some say though If there's difficulty That you should leave it Then Allah SWT says This month Is the month that the Qur'an was revealed The Qur'an The inzaal of the Qur'an Allah SWT On the 27th According to most of the scholars But the Prophet said Look for it in the odd days Of the last 10 days The Qur'an came down to the world The entire Qur'an Jibril A.S. Brought the Qur'an down to This earthly canopy The heavens The earth of the heavens And then over 23 years It was revealed Peace meal to the Prophet SAW Based on the circumstances And the incidents Over the lives of the Sahaba And the Prophet SAW So the Qur'an came down Inzaal one time And then over 23 years Allah SWT revealed it Through Jibril A.S. Peace meal So this is the month of Ramadan It represents the gift Of the Qur'an Which is why we return to the Qur'an In the month of Ramadan The Prophet SAW Said in a sound hadith He said The fasting And the Qur'an Will intercede for you Allah gives them a voice On the Day of Resurrection And they intercede For people that practice it What does Siam say? He said I prevented him From his appetites In the daytime And from his food And so Allow me to intercede for him I prevented him from sleeping at night These are the things that we do So fasting is not just in the daytime There's an element In the night time Which is sleeping less Than we normally sleep So we eat less Than we normally eat And we sleep less Than we normally sleep And what is the gift? Allah SWT Accepts her He grants them their shafa'a For the servants that do this Look at the Prophet SAW He didn't increase his tahajjud Woman and lady He didn't increase his prayers In Ramadan We do To get closer To the practice of the Prophet That he did all day Every year He didn't increase his practice Of prayers That was his practice The whole year The Prophet was practicing He didn't increase his practice Of prayers Aisha One of the great salaf Aisha said Tell us the most wondrous thing That you saw From the Messenger of Allah And she said What thing that he did Wasn't wondrous He came one night to me And he entered into the bed with me I could feel his flash up against my flash He said Oh daughter of Allah Leave me to go And pray to my Lord And she said I love to be close to you But I prefer what you prefer He got up To the place The water container And he did wudu And it was a light wudu So he began to cry Until the tears covered his chest And he continued like that Until Bilal came And he told him The prayers come in In other words Fajr So Aisha said What is making you cry When your sins Anything you've done And his sins are Doing a virtuous thing When a more virtuous thing could be done When all your sins have been forgiven What past And what is to come And the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said Should I not be a grateful slave Should I not be a grateful slave In a similar hadith in Al-Bukhari He stood until his feet had the edema From standing so long And he said Shouldn't I be a grateful slave Gratitude Allah SWT says Allah wants ease for you In this fasting He doesn't want hardship for you He didn't reveal this Quran for you to be miserable He wants ease for you And for you to be grateful This is the time to be reminded O you who have believed Say From the good things we have provided you Thank Allah O you who believe Eat of the good things of Allah But show gratitude for those things If you are truly worshipping Allah SWT One of the most blessed things That we have in this world Is food It brings us together It nourishes our bodies It sustains us And then The pleasure of food itself This is a great gift Allah could have made brackish water That we had to drink He could have given us rocks That we had to crush as our nutrition But he gave us cherries And grapes And figs He gave us varieties of meat He gave us all of the blessings That the earth brings forth What does Allah ask us? Shukr Work Do things out of gratitude O Al-Dawood And how few of my servants Are always grateful Always grateful He didn't say Shouldn't I be a grateful servant? Shaker You can be shaker One time or another time When you're shaker It's called It's the form of hyperbole It means you're always grateful Our Prophet ﷺ was always in a state of gratitude This was his whole experience Of the world's gratitude One of the worst things about modern times Is in gratitude Is cultivated in people They're ungrateful for the police They're ungrateful for government They're ungrateful for their education They're ungrateful for everything People just complain all the time And Allah SWT Your Lord has declared If you're grateful I will increase you in blessings To be grateful for But if you are an ingrate If you lack gratitude In fact, if you show ingratitude I will give you more reasons to be ungrateful I will give you more reasons to be ungrateful This is a metaphysical equation Gratitude equals increase in blessings Ingratitude equals decrease in blessings This is a qaida It's a law It's a metaphysical law that's as true As the Newtonian physics that you learned in high school If you're ungrateful Then Allah will give you more to be ungrateful about More to whine about You think it's bad now? You have no idea how bad it can get Read history to know how bad it can get You think Syria is bad? Read about the Mongol invasion They didn't have any place to flee to You think the Muslims are having tribulation in America? Read about Nazi Germany And what happened to the Jews? We have to be grateful Because if we're ungrateful and always complaining Allah is going to give you more to complain about I was in one of the Gulf states And somebody was complaining about the price of gasoline Nazi driver 25 cents at the time Now it's a lot higher Why? Because they keep complaining Go ahead, complain all you want Because if you love to complain Allah will give you plenty to complain about But if you want to show gratitude Allah will give you plenty to show gratitude about They did a study at Davis It's called the gratitude study for depressed people They had them write down every day Every morning, 10 things they were grateful for Over a period of a month People's depression started being lifted When you start counting the blessings of Allah You'll never come to an end And you can count blessings like just eyelashes People don't have eyelashes They fall out Eyelashes are a wonderful blessing Or some people have dry eyes So if you have moisture in your eyes What a blessing If you don't have teeth, what a blessing If you don't have teeth, if you have dentures What a blessing There's people that don't have dentures If you lose one arm, what a blessing You didn't lose both arms If you lose both arms, what a blessing Now they have prosthetic devices That enable you to do things Even Abbas said In every tribulation in dunya There are three blessings hidden that you have to recognize The first is That it could have been worse The second is That it's in your dunya And not in your deen And the third In your world the affairs are not in your religious affairs And the third it's in this world And not in the next And you should be grateful for that People now are complaining Allah said He's going to try you To see who of you are the best in actions We're going to try you You will be tried In your wealth And in your lives And Allah told us You're going to hear all these people Telling how horrible you are And how terrible your religion is Allah said that What does he say? How's our response? What's our response? We're in Tasbiru And if you show patience And show piety Restraint Control your body Control your body Control your body Control your body Restraint Control yourself Because that is at the essence Of this matter That is at the essence Of this matter This is our deen Allah SWT said And the village was For example The village was safe And safe And it came at its own risk From everywhere And it refused to worship Allah Allah's will Allah's will And fear For what they used to do Allah strikes a similitude For you to think A similitude Allah strikes A similitude For you to reflect A township A city A hamlet That was Peaceful It was tranquil It had provision In abundance Coming from every place Like we have today We eat Berries from chili And we drink tea from China And we have rice from India Basmati rice In your homes from India You get all this Blessing from all over the world So what did they do Instead of saying Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah They were ungrateful This is the meaning of kufr Kufr is in gratitude You can be a Muslim And be a kafir In the meaning that You're an ingrate Right? This ingratitude That's the essence of kufr The essence of Islam Is gratitude Shukr A feeling of blessing That Allah has given The biggest blessing Is that We exist Niamat al-Ijad When Niamat al-Imdad The blessing of giving us Our existence And then sustaining our existence He could take away that Sustainance at any time So Allah SWT says That he enveloped that city In hunger Look at the blessing of food In hunger and terror Hunger and terror Why? Bima Ba'a sabbiya What's the cause? Because of their ungratefulness And this is what we've lost An understanding of our religion We look at all these events We don't see the real source Of these events In gratitude If we want to change the world We have to change our state And our attitude About all these blessings That we've been given Government is a blessing Even the worst form of government Is better than anarchy Even a tyranny is better This Malik Ibn Anna said this These weren't ignorant people These were genius people Because he lived through civil wars He saw what happens When things break down The people of Damascus Six years ago Were eating beautiful food They had good clothes It was one of the few countries On the planet That was actually self sustained And now all of this tribulation And if you say Why is it happening to them And not us Maybe because Allah loves them more Because we know Ahlus Sham Have a maqam So Allah will put All of the Torments of the Akhirah He'll put it in the dunya For a short period And then they go back to Allah Completely free Of any tribulation Or punishment Maybe it's the places That aren't being afflicted That deserve to be afflicted That should be worried This is the way Muslims traditionally Look at things When the maqul came down When the Mongols came down They didn't say These evil Mongols They said This is a punishment God has sent to us Because of our wrong actions That's how they looked at it Muslims don't look at that anymore Evil America Evil Israel Evil Okay good Allah put them in power He says He gives power to them He pleases Muslims had it If Muslims had nuclear weapons Right now with the idiots That we have We would have nuclear Conflagrations all over Allah knows what He's doing Allah knows who He gives power to Yes, they abuse their power But to what degree Who would be worse? People want the destruction of America Well, let's see what happens When China gets the world power See if there's going to be An Abu Ghraib that you hear about See if there's going to be Any way, recourse To redressing any wrongs Allah ta'ala anum I don't know But sometimes The worst things Are answered prayers We don't know The different way of looking At the world People don't want to look at it That way But I read the Quran And the Quran It comes back to me Where did this calamity come from? Allah says It's from your own selves It didn't say Oh, it's from those evil Quraish Those evil Quraish No Allah wanted the Quraish To become Muslim He entered them The Messenger of Allah What do you say? You say My brother My son My son My son You're a noble son of a noble Go away today You're free today I forgive you He said what He said what Yusuf said To his brothers who threw him in a well And left him to die Because that's the state of believers When they get angry Yes, we get angry But they realize What am I really getting angry at? At a test that God sent me Whom am I really angry at? See, you can be humanly angry But who are you really angry at? If everything is a test from Allah Then who are you really angry at? That's a question Allah said May we thank you May we thank you May we thank your Lord May we thank your Lord No, thank you very much These are days of shukr For the sake of another happiness You have two joys He has a joy when he completes He breaks his fast Because he's completed the Ibadah And then the delight of the food Most of the big ulama said It's Mam Ata'a It's completing That's the farha It's not the food It's actually finishing the Ibadah That's Imam Nohoi High maqam Allah SWT says وقليل من عبادية الشكر The Prophet was shakr But he told us to be shakr One of the A'rifin said هَا دَلْضَمِرُ with that هَأُلَا عِبَادُ with that هُنَكَ عِبَادُ الْأَسْمَ So that's a high maqam It's where you're always grateful وَالْشُكُرُ صَرْفُ الْعَبْدِ مَا أُولَاهُ مَا أُولَاهُمْ مِنْ نَعْمَاهُ فِي رِضَاهُ This is what all the ulama taught And Muhammad al-Musawi said Is the meaning of shukr Real shukr Shukr is to utilize what God has given you اِعْمِرُوا عَلَى الدَّوُودِ شُكرًا To utilize what he's giving you Out of gratitude He gave you an eye to see Not to look at pornography He gave you a tongue to speak the truth Not to lie Not to cheat Not to backbite He gave you a hand to work And not to steal Or to embezzle Or to take things that aren't yours He gave you feet to walk in righteousness وَعِبَادُ الرَّحْمَانِ الْلَذِينَ يَمْشُونَ عَلَى الْأَرْدِهُونَ The servants of the merciful Who walk tread lightly on the earth You know they talk about carbon footprints now Carbon footprints اِبَادُ الرَّحْمَانِ don't have a carbon footprint They tread lightly on the earth وَإِذَا خَادُبُوا مَنْ جَاهِدُونَ قَالُوا سَلَمَا Allah says اِنَّا انزلناهُ فِي لَيْلَةَرْ قَدْرِي وَمَا أَدْرَاكَ مَا لَيْلَةُ الْقَدْرِي We revealed this book on لَيْلَةَرْ قَدْرِ And what will convey to you what لَيْلَةَرْ قَدْرِي is لَيْلَةَرْ قَدْرِي خَيْرُ منْ أَلْفِ شَهَرْ It's better than 83 months of worship The Prophet was because he was so covetous about solicitous for his ummah He was concerned that his ummah would not have a lot of rewards when he knew that the ancients had much longer life spans So this is من خَصَائِسِ رَحْمَتِ وَمَنْ خَصَائِسِ عُمَتِ This is a specific gift to this ummah that they have a night that is worth months of ibadah And so in a lifetime you can literally get years added onto your ibadah This is a great gift from Allah And this is why Allah SWT the Prophet SAW said من قام رمضان إيمان و احتساباً غفر لهم تقدم من ذنبه Whoever stands doing extra acts and the tarawih stands doing extra acts he has his sins forgiven of what passed وَمَنْ صَامَ رَمَضَانِ إيمان و احتساباً غفر لهم تقدم من ذنبه And whoever fasts the month of Ramadhan believing in Allah and believing that the reward is from Allah أصيام لي و أنا أجذي Fasting is my own And I reward it myself That's what Allah SWT says وَمَنْ قَامَ In the hadith وَمَنْ قَامَ لَيلَةَ القَدْرِ إيمان و احتساباً غفر الله لهم ما تقدم من ذنبه و ما تأخر Or as Allah SWT said Whoever stands on the night of Qadr in belief and expecting a reward from Allah he will have his sins forgiven The Prophet SAW said In the hadith الصلوات والجمعة إلى الجمعة و رمضان و إلى رمضان مكفرات لذنوب That your prayers Each day you pray مشتنب or مشتنب الكبائر As long as he avoids major wrong actions The prayer The five prayers that you do And then Jumu'ah to Jumu'ah Praying Jumu'ah from Jumu'ah to Jumu'ah Friday prayer to Friday prayer And then رمضان to رمضان These will remove your sins They will remove your sins As long as you avoid major wrong actions That needs a specific type of Tawbah صغائر get removed from وضو From prayer, from fasting, from Jumu'ah All these things But the major wrong actions And the عدمة differ on them But the major ones are well known معلومة دين طرورة And drinking, stealing, cheating, lying Fornication, adultery, all those things That Allah has declared foul, fahshah So this رمضان is a great gift Of this Ummah It's a time of special gratitude One of the hallmarks of gratitude Is that you share your blessings with others You share your blessings with others كان رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم أجود الناس و أجود ما يكونوا في شهر رمضان كان أجود من ريح مرسلة The Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم Was the most generous of men Always But he was even more generous in رمضان Why? زيادة الشكر The sense of blessing The gift The gift It's a great gift أقول القوري هذا أستغفر الله لوركم رسائل المسلم الحمد لله وصراته السلام على رسول الله وعلى آله ومن الله We have a lot of tribulation in our community At home and at abroad We have tribulations just Each person has their own Each one of you can give me a litany of tribulations This is just dunya دارو بلاعين دو دينك دنيا هي This is dunya So all those tribulations that you have If you put them next to all the blessings you have They're nothing And that's why if you focus on your tribulations You'll become ungrateful If you focus on your blessings You'll become grateful I advise myself and all of you To count our blessings This is my advice And رمضان is one of the greatest blessings People say, oh it's so hard Are you fast a whole month without water? Oh my God People cry The righteous cry when رمضان ends You see the blessings of this month What hunger do we really have? Really It just makes you appreciate the Cornucopia of food that you have والله So this is my advice We need to show more gratitude And stop complaining Complaining Iblis is the complainer in the Qur'an He complains all the time He's so upset about things And he wants to just make us ungrateful It's his favorite thing to do Make us ungrateful Make you ungrateful for your wife Make your wife ungrateful for you Microaggressions You know all these grievance theory And victimology All of them It's a disease That Iblis has spread amongst this humanity It's a disease Racism is a reality What? Racism didn't exist in the past How do people respond to racism? انت امروكم فيك الجهلية The prophet said You're a man that still has جهلية in you He didn't say, you're a racist How dare you Abodar You racist man He didn't say that He said انت امروكم فيك الجهلية There's still some ignorance in you That's what racism is It's just ignorance What? Because your color is different from me Means that you're less than me Or I'm more than you Or you're more than me And I'm less than you That's ignorance You cut the person he bleeds Tickle him, he laughs Deprive him of food He gets hungry Make him angry He gets angry Human beings That's the human being It's human condition So how do we deal with racism? Because clearly it's a problem on the planet It always has been How did the prophet deal with it? He educated people انت امروكم فيك الجهلية You could do better than that Abodar put his hand Face on the ground And begged Bilal To put his foot on his face كفارة Just for saying You have been a Saudat Which is like using the N word today That's what he asked him to do Forgive me Ignorance It's from جهلية That's what the beauty of Islam It teaches you how to be different All these problems have been around How do we address them? How do we look to the future? All this grievance from the past The English did horrible things They did horrible things too My answer is mostly from Ireland 700 years of oppression That's not the English people today They didn't do that They didn't conquer India Those people are all dead تلك الأمر قد خلط لها مقسم I just met an Armenian man He was in the doctor's office And he said I said Have you ever been to Turkey? He said No, I can't go there I said Why? He said And then I looked at him He looked Armenian I said Are you Armenian? He said Yeah And then he was like Why do you say that? I said Because that's That prejudice that you're displaying Is cultural Those Turks today Had nothing to do With what those Turks did 100 years ago Don't blame them They're good people I said War makes people do horrible things American boys that went to Iraq They were nice boys, many of them If you met them You'd find them pleasant people You'd sit with them Have coffee Talk to them When they went into that Horrific condition of war They became murderers This is what war does to people And now they come back And what do they do? They get addicted to drugs They commit suicide Because they cannot believe What they actually did This is what war does to people That's why it's such an evil We have to let these grievances go Kulukum in Adam What Adam in Turab We're all Benu Adam We're all children of Adam We're all cousins If we went back far enough We would see Somewhere down the line We're cousins We're family This is the human condition And we have uncles That people want to kick out of the family But you can't There's people They're terrible But this is the reality How do we make it better? Remember God and don't forget Him And be grateful and don't be ungrateful That's what we say The last thing I wanted to say Subhanakumma ahamdikashadun la ilahim anta Astaghfirukuratubu ilay Eid al-Fitr When we have the Fitr For people just a reminder Zakat al-Fitr is an obligation On everybody that you have nafaqa For In other words All of your dependence on Allah Is on you Is on you Is on you Is on you For In other words All of your dependence You have to give The Eid al-Fitr And the Sa'ad Traditionally it was given on the day On the way to the prayer The Hanafi's permit it Before Which is a blessing We can use these opinions Because it's difficult in America For people to do things always And they also permit it with money The other imams They say you give it with dates Or weeds Or rice or something So There's a monetary What is it? How much? Okay So it's between five and seven To get out of khilaf It's always good to go to the higher So I would say You know give seven dollars For each person in your family And they have the boxes And everything But do that because The fasting is muallak It's suspended It won't go to Allah Until you've done the Zakat al-Fitr Zakat al-Fitr is only for There's eight categories In Tawba In the sixtieth verse In Tawba Faridah So this is a faridah It's only for Fouqara and Masakin That's the Zakat al-Fitr That's the Zakat al-Fitr