 alhamdulillah, once the Sahaba were sitting in a circle in the Masjid of the Prophet ﷺ and the Rasul ﷺ came out to see them because his room was adjoined to the Masjid. So he came out of his room and he came into the Masjid and he saw a circle of the Sahaba. So he was wondering, what is it that is making you sit here? So he came up to this circle and he said, what is making you guys sit in the Masjid? It's not a time for prayer right now. Why are you just sitting in a circle in the Masjid? And they all said, O Rasulullah, jalafna nada'u Allaha wa n'ahmaduhu ala ma hadana l-dunihi wamanna alayna biq. He said, we have sat here, we sat here, O Messenger of Allah, to make dua'at to Allah, so we're calling out to Allah and to praise Allah. That's why we sat here, to call out to Allah and to praise Allah for that which he guided us to of his Deen. And to praise Allah for the fact that he blessed us with you. Okay, this is narrated in the Sunnah of Imam Nasa'i. And the fact that, and the Prophet ﷺ asked them, he said, Allah ma ajda sakum illa daa. He said, do you swear by Allah that nothing, that this is exactly what has made you sit here? Exactly what you said? No business? You're not just hanging out, waiting, passing time, not to the school, not for anything, any other reason? And they said, Allah ma ajda sakum illa daa, they said, we swear by Allah, nothing has made us sit down except the purpose that we said, to make dua'at to Allah, to praise him for guiding them to Islam and to thank Allah for sending the Prophet to them. And the Prophet ﷺ said, I didn't ask you to swear because I doubt or I suspect that you guys are not here for that reason, but it's because Jibril ﷺ just came to me in my room. And he said, he said that Allah is boasting about you people in front of the angels. So he said, I wanted to come see, what is it that you people are doing, that Jibril ﷺ had to come down and tell me that Allah himself is remembering you all. And this is the, what the Sahaba used to do, they used to sit around and thank Allah for sending the Prophet to them, why? Because there was an unbreakable bond between the Prophet ﷺ and the Sahaba. And that bond has endured to this day. And when we look at why people love other people, why people are attached to them, why loyalty occurs, you realize, for example, who are the people that you love in your life? Your parents, you know, maybe a respected teacher, your spouse, you're attached to them because of some things that they've done or that they represent for you. What was it that the Sahaba loved the Prophet ﷺ more than anything else? It's the qualities of the Prophet ﷺ that attached their hearts to him. In fact, SubhanAllah, we know that if it was not for the Prophet ﷺ, they knew this too. We would never know Allah. We would never even probably say the word Allah. We would probably scatter it in different religions, the religions of our ancestors. When we wouldn't have no idea about the Qur'an, we would have no idea about what it's like to pray Salah, or what it's like to fast in Ramadan, or to hear the beautiful hadith of the Prophet ﷺ. Then we look at the Prophet ﷺ and the guidance that he sent us. And we look at just to get us this guidance, what he had to do. Many times, the person that we love the most, in fact, the Prophet ﷺ ordered us, who do we love the most? Our mothers. Three times before our fathers. SubhanAllah, of what our mothers went through to bring us into the world, even if we never, even if they didn't live beyond that time. But what they did for us by carrying us and bringing us into the world is something so great that they are the people that we should be showing the most love to in the world. And yet the Prophet ﷺ had no actual relationship between himself and all of us necessarily. But what did he do in order to bring the Qur'an and Sunnah to us? In order for us to be sitting here today, think about this, he suffered for our sake. He toiled for our sake. He gave up every single thing he knew, all of his comforts for our sake. He underwent mockery. He underwent, he was called a liar, he was called a magician. He had to leave his homeland. His loved ones were tortured. His daughters were divorced by their husbands. When you look at why you love somebody, it's because they sacrificed something for you. Any single thing that means anything to you in this life, the Prophet ﷺ sacrificed it for us. Just think about that. Whether it's your wealth, whether it's your family, your reputation, your position, any single thing that you can think of that you like, the category of that was sacrificed by Rasulullah ﷺ for people that he would never see in this earthly realm. The Sahaba, they were around him all the time. But what about the generation after and after that and after that until today? And yet our hearts, because of this, knowing that there is a human being, the best of all creation, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, who made this kind of sacrifice that even parents would not sacrifice this for their children. Parents would do a lot, but there will come a time, there will come a time that even parents reject their children. There will come a time when that break happens, they say, you know, had enough, I can't handle this child anymore or this, he's gone too astray, forget it. There are times when they get upset with you for some reason, they stop talking to you. And yet our beloved Rasul Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was treated in so many different ways by bad ways, by not only the people who opposed him, but sometimes even his own believers had such bad manners towards him that he never left them. And yet he never said to them that you have to, you know, fix how you are if you want to be with me. Instead what he did was he showed them his character, he showed them that patience. But even when people would stone him, just for the fact that he called them to la ilaha illallah, just for that fact, when they stoned him, he, when Allah sent an angel to give him the choice that if you want, O messenger of Allah, Allah has sent me, I am the angel of these two mountains, I can bring the two mountains down on the people of thought for what they did to you. You came to call them to Allah and they dared throw stone at you until you bled. And they treated you like the worst than they would treat anyone else. And they chased you out of town and they made the urchins and the rabble-rousers come after you until you were falling on your knees and could not get up again. And yet still now when you managed to escape, bloodied and bruised and collapsed in a garden far outside of the city of Baif. And now this angel is giving him the choice to take that revenge on a group of people that you think if they stoned a prophet, how can they ever be guided? What good are they? What good are these people who hate Islam so much, who hate their prophets, who hate this prophet so much? And yet he said no. Because if not them, maybe a generation will come after them, who will worship Allah. And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam's prediction came true, but even more, even more eloquently when that same generation of people came back to accept Islam at the hands of Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So within the next generation, the narraries of the hadith said, and the people of thought if were the ones who are known to be the best in the Quran, the best going into service of Allah. The most worshipful people came out of the people who humiliated and tortured our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam the most. And if you think that the same people who would have done that, they're the ones who became the same. And they're the ones who saw these things. And yet we don't know their names. Who threw those stones at the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam? We don't even know their names. Why? Because his character was big enough, so, so lofty, that even when they became Muslim, they could have easily said, you. Remember you did this to me on that day? And you. Remember you did this to me on that day? And yet he chose not even to reveal their identities. Let alone demand an apology from them. Let alone demand an apology. And this is why when Aisha asked him, was the day, the battle of Uhud, the hardest day that you had in your life, he said no. He said that the hardest day I had in my life was the day of thought. When I was, when he was alone. And there was no one else with him before Medina became a place to go to. It was that. It was that. And so the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, this was his character. And this is why, this is why when someone so holy is walking in your midst, when someone so sacred, a human being, but a different kind of human being altogether, the like of which the world has only seen very few times in the bodies of the Prophets, Alaihi Wasallahu Alaihi Wasallam, that when the last and final Prophet came, even the fact that they had done all of these things, Allah held the adab that should have normally wiped out entire people. And Allah said, because you're there, I will not punish them. Allah swt. What did he say? وَمَكَنَ اللَّهُ لِيُعَذِبَهُمْ وَأَنْتَ فِيهِمْ Allah was not good at punishing these people from the sky while you were with them. Why? So the presence of the Rasul Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, even before, even without his choice, his very presence was enough to withhold divine punishment from the entire Qaum, the entire nation of people who were brutally rejecting him and killing his family members and humiliating him and every turn torturing other people. And this is why when we ask ourselves what bound, what made that unbreakable bond, it was this. It was relentless dedication to the well-being of other people. It was the relentless dedication to seeing someone come from a lower state and not leaving them there but bringing them to a higher place where they can come to Allah swt. It demands that a person has absolutely no ego because if you have a shred of ego, you will stand up for yourself, your nafs. And the minute you stand up for yourself is the minute that the other person's ego becomes inflamed. But what did he do? He battled an ego with absolute humility. While being of course a man's man, while being brave, while not being a doormat, but while showing them that being strong and being courageous does not mean being vengeful or hateful. And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, we know, subhanAllah, that even after when he finally came back in his life story, which we'll study more on this weekend at the MCC, we can't sell the whole thing. But when he finally came back to Mecca and he had the chance to punish all of them, they were completely at his mercy and he asked them, what do you think I'm going to do to you? What do you think I'm going to do to you now? After you tortured me for 23 years, 21 years. And they said to him, they said to him, they said you are a generous brother, the son of our generous brother. They knew the character of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, but they were scared. And that's when the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, go, there is no revenge on you. I will say to you, as Yusuf Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, there is no revenge on you on this day. May Allah forgive you all. And this is where it's such an act of mercy that we have seen many oppressors go through history. In fact, there are oppressors today. And if they were in the dock of the guilty and ready to be condemned by those who are oppressed, and a radical act of forgiveness took place, where would those hearts be? Those hearts, when they see an act of almost superhuman forgiveness, they recognize that inside there is a divine quality inside. And you know, the amazing thing about the life and seerah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was that he did not do that to only keep it with himself. There he conveyed his teaching, so each of us has a potential to do that for the people around us. And to bear witness for who the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was and what he was calling to inside each of our societies and our neighborhoods and our families. And even our next door neighbors and our marriages, we have the potential to do this. And this is why Allah swt said in the Qur'an, the ayah that I read in the beginning and we have not sent you except as a mercy to all of humanity. And this is why the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is also told about in the Qur'an by saying that there is a messenger, a mighty messenger, has come to you. It weighs very heavily upon him when something is difficult for you, for you believers. And he is extremely eager for your benefit. And he is with the believers, Raofer Rahim. Allah then took his own name and described in a different way the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam being loving, compassionate and merciful. It is these qualities that are woven into the entire life story of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. But what we have to ask ourselves is this, that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam gave us everything we had. What do we give back to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam? What he wants from us is not even, is not even to repay him in any way. He didn't ask that for us. He just wants us to carry on the same mission that he suffered for and he sacrificed for. So when we think about what our dealings are like in our society, when we think about how we are, how can we abandon the character of the one who suffered for our sake, who came and showed us how to really be a beautiful person. We're living in a time of extreme confusion. Some of our own children do not even know the difference between right and wrong, the difference between man and woman, the difference between healthy and unhealthy, wholesome and filthy. We don't know the differences now, our own youth and generations. All of realities are being called into question and yet we have a shining light as Allah says in the Qur'an, here to guide us and to tell us. And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, what did he say? He said, He said, I love Allah because He has merged you with His blessing. So if you want to know how to love Allah, just think about everything Allah has blessed you with. And then he said, I love you because you love Allah. He said love me because you love Allah. He didn't even say, look at this here, he didn't say love me because of everything I've done for you. Love me for how much I suffered for you. Even in that situation, he wants you to love him just because you love Allah. But this is what makes us love him even more. You know sometimes when someone is humble and it makes you respect them even more, in this way we love the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam even more because he had no enough sins. He wasn't asking us to love him for his ego, but rather he wants our love to be conjoined with the love of Allah and Allah loved him most out of his whole creation. So may Allah SWT make us of those who hold this unbreakable bond, who recognize it, who walk with it in our lives, who correct our examples and our behaviors in our relationship between parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, in our neighborly relations, in our massages, at work, in our societies. May Allah SWT make us of those who see that this example of the Prophet Sallallahu is not made as some unreachable ideal. It's made for us to follow. It's made for us to reproduce. That's why he was sent as a human being, not as an angel. And this is why may Allah SWT make us of those who recognize what he did for us and study his life. If we want to know everything the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did for us, we study the Seerah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. I can't go over all the details, but this is what I'm here for this weekend. May Allah SWT make us of those who study his life of the Prophet Sallallahu and follow it and spread it to others.