 Today our discussion is on the topic of following in the footsteps of our predecessors and the giants that we ride on their shoulders to do the work that we do. I was reflecting on this and thinking where exactly to start the conversation. And SubhanAllah, thinking about where you start with the topic of teachers, you know, and thank you brother Ahsan for your kind words, and thinking about the different roles that I play today, SubhanAllah, and thinking how in this masjid, and many of you, the sisters I'm addressing here particularly, attend with me classes here at the MCC. This very room fills the conference room every Friday night, Baruk Allah Fikrun, and I hope inshallah that continues to grow and all the girls that have been served by the Rahmah Foundation because MCC has been such a blessed host to the girls and women's work here in the Bay Area. And I think about the thousands, now we've reached the thousands of girls that we have mentored through our programs, through our halakas, through our camps, through our women's qiyams and through our classes, through the hipth school that we run, SubhanAllah, thinking about what that means when ten years earlier there was really no such specific organization set here in the Bay Area for women and girls. And when I think about the legacy and what that means and whose shoulders we're standing on, I have to think of course of our teachers but I'll come to that soon. When I think about the work, another field that's underserved which is on mental health and thinking about how to integrate Islamically the work of our predecessors, again, into the field of mental health today and think about the shoulders that we stand on to do that work, I'm also reminded of all of our teachers, SubhanAllah, that have instructed us not to take things at face value, not to take things exactly wholesale how you were taught, but rather go back into the tradition, figure out what Islam and our great legacy actually said, pull that out and figure out how to implement that into today's society. SubhanAllah, this kind of work is the kind that you have to look and you think about that journey, you have to figure out who inspired that journey. And for me SubhanAllah, I'm reminded of the famous saying of the scholars that whoever has taught me even a letter is my master. And some of the shayyuch would say that even if you taught me just a simple concept, you are forever my sheikh. What is the most important concept that each and every one of us here in the room have? Think about it. What is the most prized knowledge and possession you hold today? What is it? Think about it. What is it? What is it? La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasoolallah, that is your most prized possession. Who taught it to you? Who? Your parents. And I think about all the teachers that I've had and all the scholars who I've been blessed to sit on their feet and study. But ultimately, the first teachers, the first, my first teachers, the teachers who taught me the kalima and likely taught you the kalima is whom? Your parents. And I'm reminded that that's where the journey has to start when we first discuss our own journeys into Islam and into the study and continuation of teaching of Islam. And I'm reminded SubhanAllah of my own father and here I'd like to share with you a story specifically for all the parents in the room and all the young people in the room and particularly as a woman teacher, I want to share with you the story. My father, when he was maybe in somewhere like around middle school, went to his father and said, I think I want to be a teacher of the deen. I think I want to study the deen full time. His father, Masha'Allah, being a Saleh, Alhamdulillah, took him by the hand and walked him to Azhar al-Sharif in Cairo. And they went to the admissions office and said, we'd like to enroll young Yasir in Al-Azhar. The response was, well, since he wasn't with us since elementary school, he can't actually be enrolled. My father was devastated. He was very upset. And it was really the foremost place in Cairo where he was from to study the deen. But he held it in his heart and continue private studies. And he said that day, as a young middle schooler, he made a dua'at to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and said, Ya Allah, if ever my child was to ever come to me one day and say, I want to go study the deen, I would let them. Fast forward, years later. In comes Rania. And the day came where I was a middle schooler, SubhanAllah. And I said to my father, Baba, I'd really like to go study the deen. And he said the realization hidden. And it's like the ayah and the Qur'an, right. He said, what am I to do? I made a wa'at to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala that if my child ever were to want to study the deen, I would fulfill that a'ad. And what was open at the time was Damascus, Syria. And SubhanAllah Ta'ala, what was there was a beautiful tradition for women, particularly young girls, to go and study the deen, to study Qur'an, to do their hifaf, to work on the traditional classical Islamic sciences to the level of Ijazah. And it was beautiful tradition. And I say was because we all know the state of Syria today and I ask you to make du'a. In that time period of studying the deen, it was a beautiful journey that started when I was a teenager. And the roundabout way of how I ended up in Damascus is also a beautiful story. But what I want to share with you specifically here is the kind of teachers that I met when I was there. Because when we talk about standing on the shoulder of giants, we also have to talk about how it is we have programs for girls and women like today that we do. I'll tell you what I saw. I saw women who were hafi that of Qur'an, who are faqihat, who are muhaddithat, who are women who held Ijazahs in, and I should translate all of this, in Tujweed and Qur'an, who held their Ijazah as a license, an Islamic license to teach, in fiqh, which is Islamic law, in hadith, in Qur'an, and all of the major Islamic sciences. But you know what I saw? I didn't see them as one-dimensional beings, just classes with a teacher, and then you go home and it's a different life. No, we followed them into the home, and this is the beauty of having women teachers for women, especially young women. And I would be reciting my, doing my tismiah, my actual recitation of Qur'an to my teacher while I'm following her around her house, and as she's doing her dishes, or folding her laundry. And every so often, I would see the members of the family go by, and life was being lived. And I learned more than just the lessons of the book. I learned how to be a wife. I learned how to be a mother. And those were more important than the black and white that I was learning in the texts, you see. And this is why that lesson was so powerful, and why it is the programs we have for the girls tonight, which is modeled on exactly what I saw in Damascus, is a mentorship program. It's not just come and learn a couple of good words, feel good and leave. It's having Islam be part and parcel of your life every single day. The in and the out, like my teachers would make this du'a and say, Allah, let our insides match our outsides, and let our outsides match our insides. That you're true to your deen from the inside and the out. And that was so powerful about what I saw amongst my teachers. And all the work that I do, and all of us do collectively, it is on their shoulders that they taught us these things. And we have to give thanks because the Muslim, the Mu'min, is one who has to give thanks. And I think we'll fast forward again, the trip to Damascus continued many, many, many years until the war started, which meant that it paralleled all of my studies because my parents, as much as they, it was always a struggle, always a struggle to get to Damascus. But when I think about the request to continue my regular studies, as they called them, they insisted that I continue my regular studies. And so the dean studies were interwoven in with the high school, college, medical school, residency. It was all interwoven in. And when I think about that struggle, I think, Subhanallah, how we have so much time on our hands, and people would say, how do you have the time to do what you do? And I say, I'm just following what I saw my teachers do. Every single one of those women, even though she was a Hafida, or a muhaditha, or every type of Islamic scholar there is, or multiple, she was likely also a physician, or an engineer, or a teacher, or she was working in the public sector. And I think about the combination of roles, and then I think about our scholars, and how they were what we would call encyclopedic scholars. Where medicine doesn't necessarily define me, it is one of the studies I've studied and one of the things I do. And that is how our scholars were. Just earlier today, Shahamza was telling me, did you know Imam Ghazali was also a mathematician? I'm not surprised. They were encyclopedic scholars. They mastered multiple sciences. And they were real people in real homes that had families that had children that had parents that they cared for and children that they cared for. Subhanallah. And now I want to tell you, you know, I would love to talk more and more actually about Syria and the blessed things. I want to tell you about one particular teacher. I shared this story with some of the sisters here. I think it was last week in our Halaqa. But it really, really hits the heart really much, masha'Allah. It is a story that takes place when I am actually doing my Tasmiyah, my memorization to my recitation rather, to get ready for my Ijaz exam. And in this case, it was for the Qiraat of Wadish. And I'm sitting in front of talk about giants. One of the giants of Damascus, masha'Allah, somebody who all of the women and all of the men knew to be a master of Qura'an. Someone who was so diligent and so well versed in Qura'an, that it is said that the, not said that it's true, but the main in Damascus, the way the setup was for receiving your Ijaz and Qura'an, is you have to recite to your teacher. Then your teacher takes you to their teacher. That teacher takes you to their teacher. Until you reach the final, basically the top of Qura'an of Damascus, which were five, and you had to recite to one of the five in order to actually receive your Ijazah that had the official Khatim from waza'at al-Awqaf of Damascus. It's a very rigorous process. And so here I am reciting to my teacher's teacher's teacher. And I'm getting ready, just about ready to go to the sheikh and recite. So I've prepared for some time and I'm sitting there reciting to her and her heiba, her presence, her the vibes, masha'Allah, this amazing person, despite all of my studies, all I could get myself to read was t-t-t-t-t. And so she, she said, Rania, Rania, Rania, you know, take a break. So I was so embarrassed, masha'Allah. She said, take a break. And then she decided to, like, call me this beautiful story, masha'Allah. She decided to calm me down by telling me a story. And she said, Do you know my story? You're a giant, masha'Allah. And she said, No, no, no, no. I'm also, I had no idea, I'm also a professor of mathematics at the University of Damascus. And I have been, and since the 70s, the only female faculty member in mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Diversity of Damascus. I had no idea. I was blown away. Amazed. And I'm just sort of, and she said, Did you know? I wasn't always a sheikh. I wasn't always a muqri, a jamia. She had all 10 recitations completed in Ijaz on all of them. And she said, I wasn't always this person. In fact, I came to Islam late. I thought I came to Islam late. And then she said, You know, when the wave of feminism hit Damascus, so many of us were taken by it. And all of all the people that were thought themselves to be educated and more advanced, maybe social economically, we all took off our hijabs. And we all, you know, and she said, I just was raised in a family that wasn't at all religious. So it's not like she took off her job. She just was raised in a family that wasn't religious. And I thought to myself, I can do what any man does. And I'm going to study the most complicated thing. And so she chose mathematics. And she became very good at it. And it's incredibly brilliant woman, very good at it that she became a professor, the only professor who was a female in her department, in a very male oriented department. And so she said, There I am. And I wanted to affirm that I as a woman can do this, right in that kind of mentality. She said, One day, the girls of the college came up to me and said, We want to have there's very few women on campus. We want to have a woman's gathering, a woman's talk about, you know, being a woman on campus. So she said, Yes, anything for women. So she met with them. She's not very busy as a professor, but she went ahead and met with them. And so she's sitting in the circle of woman, and she said, I don't know how I didn't realize what I saw later. So here we are at first, the discussion is just going on about academics and being a woman and how difficult it is and so on in education. This is this discussion is back in the 70s. And she said, I don't know when the conversation switched from the discussion of academics to the discussion of the Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. I don't even because if someone had told me they were going to discuss the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, I would never have showed up. I was so closed off to this idea. But as they were talking, as the girls were talking, she said, suddenly something hit my heart and it just opened. This heart that had been so close to anything related to religion, to Islam, to the Prophet anything was so closed off. And when Hidayah is meant to come, the moment and how and that on the tongue of whom it comes with, Allahu ta'ala, and it just opened. And she said, There I was suddenly I was hit with this wave of love for the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And I found myself listening intently. And then I realized, wait a second, this group is almost all hijabies. And she said, And do you know what I was wearing that day? And this is where the real crux of the story is. I said, Yeah, and you could possibly be wearing. So she says to the whole conversation is happening in Arabic. And then when she came to this point, she said, Mini skirt. And I said, what? So in English, she repeats again, Mini skirt. Clearly, it showed on my face. I was just, and she said, You know, yeah, Rania, if the woman had judged me for how I looked, I never would have entered into that room. If they judged me for who on my just what my outside was, I never would have been invited in to study the Dean. If they had judged me and said, Oh, she's one of those women. She's one of those feminist. I don't know what woman, right? I would never have begun this journey. And there I was fully welcomed by this group. And one thing led to another one holoca led to another one teacher led to another and that brilliance that she took to get a doctorate in mathematics at a time when all their woman had a doctorate in mathematics. Imagine putting that brilliance into the memorization of Quran. She became so learned in Quran and so accurate in all of her pronunciation that the sheikh, the head sheikh that we receive Ijazah from Rahimahullah, Rahimahullah, both of them, upon Allah, that when he would travel to go on Hajj, even though he had hundreds of students, hundreds of male students underneath him, he would choose her in his post to fill in for him to give Ijazah on his behalf when she was when he would travel. That's how qualified she was. And she said, had they judged me, had they looked at me and said, oh, you can't enter the message like that sister, here's a blanket. I'm being very serious. I tell the story to you because it really resonates with me. And it resonates the kind of woman that I studied with. And it resonates that anybody, this dean is for everybody. This dean is accessible to men and to women. This dean is accessible to your daughters. This dean, I'm talking to the woman and to the men. It is accessible to your sons. It is accessible to kids like me who grew up in America. And subhanallah, there are options now. There are options to study now and out here in this country. And I could go on and on about my teachers of Damascus, but I want to bring back to another important teacher. We'll kind of take you from the land of Damascus back to the Midwest. And here I am, having begun my initial studies of Damascus. I'm a teenager. I was very young, just a teenager. And my parents, Jazahumullah al-Khayr said, you know, they had a group of family friends, like many of you have family friends they would meet with regularly, would go to each other's houses and so on. And so they said, well, everybody now is a teenager. Maybe we should make sure that all this Islamic knowledge we've been telling them in their Islamic schools and their Sunday schools and their Saturday schools, we also went to Saturday school. And all of the extra things that, you know, we've been teaching them to make sure it's really resonating. How do you make sure that teenagers really understand the Dean that you've been teaching them? So the parents, the ammos in the group decided that each teenager was going to go ahead and give a lecture. To whom? To the parents. And before I knew it, I was picked to be the first one. I went to my father and I said, with my mother, I said, I don't have anything to speak about. What am I going to talk about? They said, anything, anything, everything that you've been, you know, reading and studying and just anything. Don't worry about it. Well, right before that, right before that, I had been to a conference, one of my first, and I'd heard some really amazing speakers speak at this conference. And Sheikh Omar outdated himself, so I'm going to outdated myself too. Inshallah. And the speakers were amazing. I'll tell you, my very first, my very first encounter was I was, they asked me to volunteer and to give out little note cards to the people who are sitting in the lecture to collect questions. So here I am with a stack of note cards and I'm kind of just going around giving different people. And then the speaker gets up on the stage and he starts to speak and I can, and I can't even begin to tell you the amount of eloquence and the Arabic and the English and the so on and the Qur'an and I had never heard anything like this. I was standing in the middle apparently in the middle of the aisle, right, because I was giving out note cards to where somebody had to tap me on the shoulder and go, move. The speaker was Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. I didn't know who Sheikh Hamza was at the time. And I remember finishing that lecture and running over, we were in the youth hall and the parents were in the adult hall, and running over and going, Mama, Mama, I'm looking for my mom frantically and going, there is this person, and he's a connovert and he can speak, and he can speak Arabic, yes, and he, and he's, and it's amazing. And she said, tell you, tell you. And then right after that, the next lecture in the Arabic hall, right, that was giving, the lectures being given in Arabic was the same speaker. Sheikh Hamza had just finished giving us a talk in English and then gave the parents their talk in Arabic. And then my mother said, oh, this is very special. So I took on, that night I took cassette tapes back home. And I also, in that conference, heard an amazing other speaker. Really, really taken subhanallah, just amazing. You think of the young hearts, what these what these lectures do to young hearts, and took on the cassette tapes. So back to the story of my father when he asked me to prepare the lecture, I was looking frantically through the, my stuff, I was like, what do I do? I need to prepare, I don't know what to, pulling books off shelves and figuring out. And then I went through my stack of cassette tapes, and I pulled out a tape titled, Whom Do You Follow? Whom do you follow? It was by Imam Siraj Wahaj, which is the other dear speaker that I had spoken at that conference and really touched the heart. You know what I did? I copied every single line from, from his lecture, literally. And in the lecture, I hope you hear this lecture one day, every few sentences he says, Whom do you follow? And then he would keep going, Whom do you follow? And keep going, masha'Allah. So I would write Whom do you follow, every single time. And when it came to my turn that weekend to teach, to give the lecture, I held, I sat between the mom's hall, the woman, where the woman's sitting, where the men were sitting, they put me in the middle. And I held the papers, and I gave my very first lecture ever. In the words of Imam Siraj Wahaj, Whom do you follow? Letter, by letter, word, by word. Alayjzi al-fred. Especially for those of you who've been in my halakas, you're all giggling right now. Yes, this is how we started. Now, fast forward a couple more years, just a couple more years. And suddenly, I am responsible for putting together a MINNA conference. I'm still high school there at this point. MINNA Muslim Youth of North America, which was a youth conference that continues to happen, and I encourage our children to go, and had happened when I was growing up, and I really believe the MINNAs, the MSAs, and these kinds of organizations really made from our Islamic identities. So I was in charge of 300 kids, 300 teenagers like myself, and I have zero previous experience organizing anything. But to show you where we got our start, Safanullah. And the organizer said, now mind you, this is before email, before texting, before social media, before, you literally had a landline with the cord. Yes? That's all there was. No cell phones. Just the landline with the cord. Or you write a letter, a handwritten letter. Those were the only ways you communicate with anybody. They gave me a sheet, and the sheet literally had the names of different speakers, and their phone numbers. And it said on their things like Sheikh Hamza Yusuf's phone number, Imam Siraj Wahaj's phone number. Different era, completely different era. I picked up the phone, here I am 17. I pick up the phone. Assalamu alaikum, my name is Rania. I'm organizing a MINNA conference. Would you be willing to come, Imam Siraj Wahaj? Who picks up the line on the other end. And he says MINNA conference? Where? I say Detroit. He says, put me down. And that was that. And Imam Siraj Wahaj shows up to Detroit because a high schooler asked him to speak at a high school conference. Not MSA college students, not adults, high schooler. He's in New York. He comes out because a high schooler asked him to speak. And if you look at Imam Siraj Wahaj's itinerary, you will see that every day, for years on end, he has been traveling all of the communities of this country. And the impact he has made on every single one of us without fail. Each of us has stories to share about this person. And probably, and I'll end with this, that the most beautiful story is that one of our own teachers was speaking this morning and she said to me, back when I converted in the 80s, Imam Siraj Wahaj was a name. And today Imam Siraj Wahaj continues, may Allah bless him and increase him, continues to be a name. And all the names in between, they're no longer names. And she said what's the most beautiful thing about that time period, or about him, is the fact that he stayed consistent, consistent, consistent, consistent without fail. And thereby affecting generations of people, I'm a nameless 17-year-old, who am I, continue to affect generations of people to stay true to their dean and on their dean and inspire those of us who went off to studies and now people call us teachers, right, who inspired us. But like the du'a of my teachers, my insides match our outsides and our outsides match our insides. Allahumma'ameen. And this is the like of Imam Siraj Wahaj. May Allah increase all of our teachers and bless all of our teachers and bless our parents. Ya Rabbi and our grandparents and our forefathers, SubhanAllah, we don't know why it is we're in this room tonight. But think about this. Like they say with the story of Sayyidina Musa Al-Khidr, when he said about why are you protecting these young children, these orphans' wealth? And he says, What? And it says in the Tafseer that it wasn't referring to their father, it was referring to their seventh forefather. And because of the seventh forefathers, Sulh, their goodness, that is why the grand children, seven generations down were protected. And the fact that Allah SubhanAllah loves you, each and every one of you, us here today to bring us here, to listen to the words of wisdom and to be on the Dean, it may have nothing to do with us. And it may have everything to do with our forefathers, our teachers, the people who had maybe less knowledge than us, less obvious religiosity than us, but raised their hands in the depth of the night one day and said, Ya Allah protect my progeny. And that's all. May Allah bless them and protect them and protect us and protect our children and our next generations. And peace be upon you. Peace be upon you. Peace be upon you.