 Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem It's very, very important for us to have that sense of honesty and really be sincere with our own selves. We don't have to share. You don't have to tell anybody what it is that you're working on. But it would be helpful to at least be honest with yourself. So let's go ahead and get started with Bismillahir Raheem. Ramadan is right around the corner. It might start on Monday. It might start on Tuesday. Is anybody excited? Alright, anybody not excited? It's okay, you're not. It's okay. You've got a long day. You've got it fast. I get it. Be honest. And this is an amazing month. We're really, really blessed to have a chance to get 30 days out of every single year where Allah literally tells us to just halt our life and focus completely on Him. We give up our food and our drink. We stand one hour, hour and a half, sometimes two hours in the mosque prayer and we really connect ourselves with the Divine. And there's a wisdom in that. This month is supposed to be a month in which we're supposed to take a step back and we're ideally setting the course of how our entire year should be or portions of our entire year outside of the month of Ramadan should have this component of consistently engaging with Allah. But many of us, we're limited, right? And we forget. We think, you know what? I can't do this. I'm not that religious guy or that religious person. I'm not going to be able to really achieve in this month. I don't really have that much potential and we limit ourselves. And what we forget is that Allah has honored the very person that is being limited. Is there any single person on the face of the earth that has the exact same DNA code as you? Specifically you, young man. Anybody? Anyone on the earth has the exact same DNA code? Probably not. I doubt it. No, right? And Allah has honored you. He says, We have ennobled Bani Adam, the children of Adam, for a reason because he created in the human being something that is so special that he gave it to no other creation. A lot of us, and we learned this especially in biology, we think that oh, we're just like animals except for our thumb. Our thumb is the only thing that's different. There's actually a lot more to us that's different. Who can tell me and share with everybody the one capacity that we have that no animal has? Please. Very good. Very good. She said the ability to make critical choices, think critically and analyze things. What faculty, what part of us is doing that? The brain, the intellect, right? In our metaphysics it is the intellect, which actually sits in Islamically. The intellect sits in the heart. It doesn't sit in the brain. Imam Ghazali writes that the intellect is sitting in the heart of the Muslim and the heart of all human beings. And so the more pure the heart gets, the sharper the intellect gets. And the more dull the heart gets with sin, the dumber that we actually become. So it's very much linked. That is the primary difference between us and animals. And so that intellect has a capacity. Every single person in this room has the capacity, whether you are 10 years old, 12 years old, 27 years old, 38 years old, 55 years old, 72 years old. Doesn't matter what your age group is. You have the capacity to go from the state that you're in now to the highest stations of nearness, calmness, tranquility, and closeness to Allah. And we also have the ability to go to the lowest levels, right? And Allah describes this in the Qur'an, right? That you can attain to the atla iliyin or the asfasafilin. So many of us, we have goals in our life. We want to try to achieve. We want to try to succeed. We want to try to do well at work or well in school. Is anybody among the youth here that wants to do well in school? Yeah? You want to do well? What do you want to do? You want to get good grades? What do you want to do? Good grades. All right. Anybody who wants to go to a good college? Where do you want to go? Somewhere good. Anybody have one in mind? Yeah. Al-Pali. Mashallah. Very good. Anybody else? Boys? Anybody college in mind? No. Okay. Maybe you'll think of it. The reason I ask that question is because the goal is there. We all have a goal. And parents generally, especially Desi parents, they always have high goals for their kids. They're immigrant parents generally. They're like, oh, beta, you must get into Berkeley or Harvard or Stanford. Otherwise, you know, my life will have been in waste. I don't know why I came to the United States. You hear this narrative very, very commonly. I'm speaking from a lot of experience here. And so they have these high goals when it comes to our dunya. But also we need to have high goals when it comes to our spirituality. Right? So we not know that every single one of us has the potential. So Ramadan is this month. It is a madrasa. It is a school. It's a boot camp for us to go from our normal lives and to take some time in these 30 days to really, really, really change. And every single person, no matter what sin we are focusing on, no matter what sin we're doing, no matter what we're indulging in, is there anybody in this room that thinks that they can't be forgiven? And it's okay if you do, but you probably want to share it. If anybody thinks that they can't be forgiven, that actually is the biggest sin in Islam. Despair is the biggest sin in our religion because sheytan is the one who makes you despair and he himself is the one who's despaired in Allah's mercy. Iblis ablasa, it means to despair. Sheytan, despair. He is trying to make a human being. So you might have done something really bad. Maybe you drank. Maybe you smoke. Maybe you smoke a lot of weed. Maybe you smoke a lot of tobacco. Maybe you're having an affair with somebody. you're looking at pictures, you shouldn't be looking at images. Very frankly, people in our community, maybe you're doing something far worse. Maybe you're like hitting your spouse or you're abusing your spouse emotionally. Maybe you are hurting other human beings. Maybe you're hurting your siblings or your friends in a very wrong type of way. Maybe you're emotionally abusing something. No matter what you've done, Allah's doors and forgiveness are open all the time and it's wide open in this month. He says that in this month, the Prophet Muhammad told us the doors of heaven are open. The doors of hell, the doors of jahannam are sealed shut and forgiveness is literally being poured down in mass quantities. Imagine just truckloads and truckloads of lights of forgiveness being poured down and it just depends who's gonna go out and catch them and seek them. And so all of us, we screwed up in our lives. There's not a single person in here, maybe some of the really innocent youth, masha'Allah, who probably haven't screwed up yet that much yet. But everybody else, we've made mistakes. Whether we were when we were young, whether it's in our current aid or we will make some mistakes in the future. But this is the month for us to turn back to Allah and we should really set high intentions, really deep intentions to think about how we wanna change in this month. And so before we get into this exercise, just start thinking a little bit about goals that you might have for this month if you've thought about them and if you haven't, it's important to just give it a little bit of thought. We know lots of people. Does anybody in here know, and anybody if anybody's comfortable sharing a story, you don't have to mention the name of somebody who just completely turned their life around after Ramadan? Anybody? No? We got some boring lies, come on. Anybody? I know lots of people. I know a lot of people. I had a friend in college, party a lot, he was in a fraternity, kids don't join fraternities. He was drinking, he was smoking, he was doing things with the opposite gender, all these types of things. And Ramadan would come and he'd kind of sort of stop. And you see this now, right? My wife was telling me about a TV show called Rami. Yeah, that's out these days, that literally portrays a Muslim youth going through these types of challenges, right? It's like, oh, in Ramadan you stop all the sin and then you get back into them after Eid. And that's very normal for somebody. But this person that I'm talking about, won Ramadan, they had a sincere Toba. It was in, on one of those nights, one of the odd nights that comes in the last 10 nights, where maybe it was night of power, maybe it wasn't. But they were turning back to Allah and said, yallah, I wanna leave all this. I don't wanna do this anymore. So whether that is that things that we're looking at, bad words that we're using, if we're always talking smack about people, if we're always gossiping, if we're always complaining, if we're always being rude to people, if we are cheating on our taxes, it doesn't matter what we're doing, this month is the month to make that intention in this very moment to change. And Imam al-Junaid, which is one of the, he's one of the greatest imams in the spiritual path. He said that one intention opens 70 doors of Taufiq. If you make a sincere intention, literally imagine 70 big doors opening for you and Allah is just saying, which one are you gonna walk through? Well, you can walk through all of them. A divine assistant. So let's take a minute and everyone would be awesome. So if you don't have one of these, by the way, we have some up here, just like work sheets for anybody who's interested. And by the way, there are also some seats up in the front row. Brothers, if you could pass these seats, I think there's a lot of sisters who aren't able to sit because the chairs are taken. We do have some seats on the brother side. There's also some in the corner over there. So that way for any of the sisters who wanna be a bit more comfortable. No more work sheets. Okay, I will ask nearby, could we get like 20 more for this? Thank you so much. Well, we'll get them printed. But basically you can write this on your phone, but for the rest of it, don't use your phone. So what is your goal in this Ramadan? That is the first question. And I would just take a minute or two for any goals that people have. And then I'm gonna share what some of our goals could be if we don't already have goals laid out. And there's also pens up here as well. So again, we're just taking a minute or two to write down any goals that we might have for ourselves in this Ramadan. All right, well, other people are writing. Anybody have, anybody wanna share? Anybody brave enough to share? Goal. Let's keep it, you know, keep it the more active we are as a group, the more, you know, enjoyable this will be. You definitely don't wanna hear this dude talking the whole night. So please share, please be engaged. Yes, Bismillah. Not eat. All right, great. Love it. And not eat like at all or just in day. Salat al-Tarawee. Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. She said, Tarawee, she tried to do all the Tarawee, which is a beautiful goal. This is the sunnambu akkadah and emphasize sunnah in our tradition, meaning it's a high level of reward. It's right below wajib. You have farth wajib and sunnambu akkadah. So it's very important actually to try to do the salat al-Tarawee, alhamdulillah. And it's like, manager angle, alhamdulillah. Thank you for opening up, alhamdulillah. That's a goal of mine as well, actually. To work on myself, be more patient, manage my anger. Yes, yes, definitely, to control the anger. And did anybody get like extra cranky when they're hungry? I mean, yeah, that's very normal, right? Like sometimes I was talking with some friend at work and they were like, oh man, Ramadan's coming. I told my team, I'm about to be like, don't mess with me after three, four PM. I was like, that does not give a good impression of us, but alhamdulillah, that's good. Anybody else want to share? Go. Yes. Masha'Allah, Allahu Akbar. That was beautiful. She said to be grateful for what we have. Very good. Very good, that was beautiful. Anybody else? Come on men, women like always are out doing us. Al right, alhamdulillah. That's, yeah, that's very time. It's so hard to wake up with, that's a beautiful goal. I promise to say what I'm saying, there is barakah in the sohoor meal. Even if you just eat like a few cookies or bases and water, just in that there's a light that is deposited from the prophetic office, that if the Prophet ﷺ said it, it's happening. A light that assists you throughout the fast for the rest of the day, it might not be literally nutrients that are assisting you, but there's a light that's coming, that you eat it every single day, and if barakah enters your soul, and we'll talk a little bit about what that means, that's gonna help you achieve divine openings that you wouldn't achieve without it. So that's a beautiful impression. Anybody else? Go, keep thinking, and then we'll move on. So I'm gonna actually get up and just write a little bit on the whiteboard, if folks don't mind, to talk a little bit to who knows what the major goal of our spirituality is. What's the goal? Like it's hard to ask, what's the goal of our life? Worship, jannah, the women always get us. Yes, attain takwa. Yes, especially for Ramadan, attaining takwa. So we heard worship, we heard jannah, we heard attain takwa. What else? Okay, no worries, if you think of it, please do share. Yeah, this is a, again, safe space, everybody feel comfortable sharing, nobody's judging anybody else, please be comfortable. Anybody else? Attaining Allah's pleasure. Alhamdulillah, these are all very good, ultimate aims that we do have. Anybody else wanna take a shot? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala defines for us in the Quran why he created us. He says, We did not create mankind and jinn except to worship me. Now that doesn't just mean we stay in the masjid and pray all day, that's not what it means, it also doesn't mean that we just fast every day or we engage in outward acts of worship. Ibn Abbas, who's the chief commentator in the Quran said, What is it? Knowledge. What is Ma'rifah of Allah? What does that mean? Anybody know? To know Allah, and yes, to be connected with Him. Yes, close, yep, yep, she said to have a close connection with Allah. So you can have somebody who memorizes an entire book on the Nayanah names of Allah. And then you can have somebody who knows a couple of names but they have this deeper, deeper connection with Allah. The person more attained in Ma'rifah is the latter person, not the person who has outward information. It's very easy to have a bunch of information and you have lots of people these days with lots of information in their head. Very few people have this experiential taste with their relationship with Allah. And for those, the younger brothers and sisters in the room, keep in mind that the goal of this society is to try to get you to be distracted from the goals that everybody else just listed. So what do they tell us? What should our goals be? What's the goal that's very commonly heard? Oh, make it rich, man, try to be like Lil Wayne, try to be like Kanye, try to be, very serious. We think that's a goal, try to be like Drake. Does anybody wanna be like Drake? Okay, if you want to, you can be on it. Listen to this song. He's a musician, musician. They try to make you think that it's about being famous, it's about being rich, it's about sleeping with a bunch of girls or sleeping with a bunch of guys. It's about, even if they think the goal is to be in political office, and then you see the types of people that end up in political office, you're like, that can't be the goal, that can't be the purpose of my life. So let's talk a little bit about what the Prophet Sassan told us our goal is. I'm gonna just draw this out. Who knows what, I think this is working. All right, so we have a couple of people who mentioned some of the goals. Can everybody see the whiteboard at least? So we heard one goal, which was to attain taqwa. Ramadan is, Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says in the Quran that the goal of Ramadan is to attain taqwa. Ya yuhl adina amanu khutiba alaykum assiyam kama khutiba lal adina min qablikum la'allakum sattakoon. Oh, you will believe we ordain fasting for you like we ordain fasting for those who became, who came before you in order that you may attain a state of taqwa. Now what is this taqwa? What is this goal of being in a state of connection with Allah or to have ma'rifah of Allah? There's an end goal and we'll say that this is, it's over here. All right, who knows what blocks us from getting to that end goal. What are a couple of main blockers? Sheytan, all right, so we heard one, so blockers, we heard one blocker, which is Sheytan, I'm gonna write it down. There's really only a few here. So, dunya, yes, dunya is there. People, okay, that's a good one. People hand blockers so people can help us. It depends on our perception of the people, but that's a good one. Anybody know, there's one that's a major one missing. It's the inside of us, nuts. And yes, yes, devices, honestly, that deserves to go up here because these days it's worse than the rest, right? Devices, technology when used incorrectly and then we heard the nuts, which is on point, the nuts. All right, so, all right, which of these are there in Ramadan? Which, who's gone in Ramadan? All right, he's out, boom. Bye-bye, Sheytan's gone. All right, so really the two main enemies of the human being that the Prophet Salaam told us about, actually there are some scholars that say it's nuts, Sheytan, Hawa, and dunya. So the ones who said dunya is very much on point and Hawa is really our screen. That's Hawa, it's our passion. So our screen is a really good one for that. But let's just focus on the nuts and Sheytan right now. All right, so, Sheytan's out. All right, so what's the nuts? Who wants to tell me what the nuts is? There's different types of nuts, right? Yeah, they're different levels. But who can just say what the, in English, what's the nuts? What's soul? What's like the, go ahead. Desire, okay, so the nuts has desire. What's like a common English translation for the nuts? Yes, ego, ego, there we go. Whoever said ego got it. All right, so the nuts is our ego. All right, so we're gonna do here in nuts. At first level, this is the ego. What is the ego? It's the part in us that calls us to all of our lower appetite. So if you're feeling lazy, that's the nuts. If you're getting angry, that's the nuts. Unjustifiably angry. If you just wanna play video games all day, that's the nuts. If you just wanna go on Snapchat all day, that's the nuts. If you just wanna go on Facebook all day, that's the nuts. If you just wanna watch Game of Thrones, that's the nuts. If you just want to watch a bunch of basketball, that's the nuts. The nuts is the part in us that calls us to all of our lower attributes and lower desires. All right, so is the nuts gone in Ramadan? Nope, the nuts is still very much present. And so the whole goal of Ramadhan, the reason why, one of the main reasons why Ramadhan exists is to discipline this ego, discipline the ego. And eventually the more you discipline the ego, the more you attain this major goal. Who plays video games in this room? All right, so yeah, all right, there we go. So what's the goal of the game? What, come on, you said what's the goal of the game? You raise your hand in the green. The win, to beat the game. All right, so there's the end goal here, Taqwa. And then you've got enemy number one, two, three, four. And these are like the bad guys, like the boss, okay? You ever defeat like Bowser and Mario, and you ever play Mario, that's a long time ago. Would you ever beat like the big boss, the kids who play games? That's enough, enough is one of the big bosses. Shaitan is out, Allah is like I'm gonna give you cheat code. I'm gonna put this away in Ramadhan, and then we still have a couple other desires. So the enough very much is stopping us, right? And you can draw a little, again, I'm not a good artist, but that's enough, it's not just you, if the enough is us, literally, it's like you look in the mirror, that's enough. But the enoughs can go from being in a bad state to being in a good state. So I'm just gonna now erase some of this, and we're gonna talk a little bit about the levels of the enoughs, and then we will go ahead and resume some of the goals. So what are the levels of the enough? Someone mentioned it. You start all the way down here at what's called the evil commanding soul, the nafs al-amara besu. Who wants to say, tell me what the, just even if you don't know that term, what is the evil, what's the evil part of your ego? Like, we all have it, so we all know what it is. Who wants to say arrogance, hiber, okay, good? Not good, actually, no, bad. All right, this is the first one. All right, so this is the goal, if somebody is struggling with major desires, like let's say you're struggling with, you're in a relationship, you probably shouldn't be in a relationship, you're like, you know, having relations and intimacy with somebody you're not married with, that's nafs al-amara. If you are smoking something, if you're drinking, if you're engaged in any major sin, if you're disobeying your parents, the worst sin after disobeying Allah, disobeying our parents, nafs al-amara. And nafs al-amara is like level one. Who wants to stay at level one in the video game? Anybody want to do that? Does anybody not want to just advance at all? Nobody wants to just enter school and just stay in first grade. Yet spiritually many of us are okay with staying in first grade. We are spiritual children. You see people in high positions in society and then you read about some of these traits and you're like, huh, yeah, I have them, some of them and then there's other people who have a lot of them too. What's going on? Why is progress defined by money or by wealth or by fame or by followers or by likes and not by our spiritual status, right? So eventually you'd learn to tame the nafs al-amara bisu which is done, who knows how you tame the nafs al-amara? Anybody have any ideas? Imam Ghazali says hunger is the biggest way to tame it. You hunger and just forcing yourself to feel that state of weakness will eventually tame the nafs. It's like you get into a video game and you know you like take some of the, you know like a Mario you have to jump and you get a bunch of stars and then you rise and you're like that's what hunger does. That's what ibadah does and that's what doa does. When you do bicar, when you stay hungry and when you make doa, the nafs al-amara starts to be tamed and goes to the next level which is the nafs al-awama, nafs al-awama. This is the self-blaming soul. This is the soul that tells you, dang it man, I really shouldn't have missed Fajr today and then you start beating yourself up a little bit. Ah, dang it, why did I miss Isha last night? Oh, dang it, why did I look at that girl when I shouldn't have looked? Why did I look at that guy when I shouldn't have looked? Why did I play that game when I should have been studying? Why did I miss my Quran lesson? Why did I watch that TV show I shouldn't have watched? Why did I listen to that song I shouldn't have listened to? That's nafs al-awama. Do you see the difference? Nafs al-amara has zero guilt. Eh, I exist, I can do whatever I want. Follow my desires, obey your thirst, just do it. All these corporate logos, they're all about the nafs al-amara, right? Obey your thirst, spray your seven up, just do it. I mean, they're really trying to incline us towards the nafs al-amara. The nafs al-awama, you now advance one level or multiple levels. This is the place where most people stay for the majority of their life because we are always doing something and then slipping up, doing something and then slipping up. Ramadan is meant to take us from either this to this or from this, inshallah, to the next level till we attain a state of taqwa. Who knows what taqwa means? English translation of the word taqwa. Who wants to guess? God consciousness, okay, very good. That's a very common translation you see in a lot of English translations, but God consciousness, yeah. Purity, beautiful, yes. Purity is a very important component of taqwa, yes. Sorry? Faith, yes. Faith is a good part of taqwa as well, very good. Mashallah, you said twice now, good job. Your parents raised you well. Who else? Taqwa. Yeah, righteousness, very good, very good. So, taqwa is a feeling though. So, you can know and memorize all this stuff intellectually and then you can feel it. So, if I have a chocolate chip cookie and I tell you, who likes chocolate chip cookies? Delicious, just made some the other day. If I had chocolate chip cookies and I told you man, that cookie was so good, it was chocolatey, it was gooey, it was sugary, it was, are you guys cold? Are you chilly? When you're by, yeah. So, if I had that chocolate, and I told you what the chocolate chip cookie tasted like, would you really get it? I mean, with me just telling you the description, you just memorized the description of the chocolate chip cookie, would you understand what the cookie tastes like? You know, what would you have to do to know what you'd have to taste the cookie? That is our faith. Nobody knows what the faiths taste like. Like if you see your grandmother and she's like immersed in Ibadah and just like in this amazing state and always doing vicar and you're like, what are you doing? You only have to pray five times a day. You're paying 25 times a day. Because she's tasting the sweetness of faith. She's tasting, it's an experiential reality. And you see some people and they're immersed in sin, they're immersed in difficulty, they're immersed in pleasures and desires, and they have no idea what this other taste tastes like. And so they're just tasting cold or whatever food they can eat. And eventually as the nuth starts to transform, the taste that the nuth has become better. When you're a kid, you just know how to eat baby food. You're like, think that's the best thing ever. And then eventually you learn about the chakras of cookie and you're like, I wanna eat that. It's the same thing with the nuths. The nuths of Lamara just taste the baby food. It just tastes the sin. Eventually you start to taste more and more and then you get to the higher level which is the nuths al-muthma inna. Who knows what this is? Someone says satisfied, good. What a, who else wants to take stab at it? Nuths al-muthma inna. We have the same word in Urdu, right? Muthma inna, to be in a state of, who knows what that tranquility, peace. Okay, so the nuths al-muthma inna is the one who is completely tranquil, is completely free of anxieties, is completely calm, completely relaxed, no worries at all, and they reach the highest states that you can reach in this life. And now they start to get towards that end goal that we decree. The end goal of what? Ma'rifah, the goal of gnosis of Allah. They're beating the game. They're like winning the video game. And those of us who are stuck here, we're losing the game. And you don't want to meet Allah. And Allah's like, dude, I gave you all the cheat codes, I gave you Ramadan, I gave you this, and you still lost the game? Did anybody want to, on the day of judgment, lose the game? Anybody? Who wants to win the game? Think everybody's raising their hand. Everybody wants to win the game. And Ramadan is that chance, it is the cheat code, it is the time that Allah gives us to win the game. So you go from nuths al-muthma inna to nuths al-muthma inna. And for anybody who wants the more detailed exposition, Imam Ghazali wrote a book in the Ahyad-ul-Madin, the book on Disciplining the Soul. He talks through this in detail. And maybe in the future, we can discuss that book in more detail right now, we won't have enough time, but that's, he has a whole breakdown. How do you go from this nuth to this nuth to this nuth? But in Ramadan, our goal is to attain taqwa, which is this experiential reality. So then we define taqwa as God consciousness, as righteousness. Taqwa in its reality is this experience that Allah is watching us in every moment, that Allah is with us. He's in this room right now, not physically, but he's here. I see a kid looking around. He's here, man. You'll see, he's there. He is in this room. Allah is with you when you're sinning. Allah's with you when you're doing good deeds. Allah's with you when you're driving. Allah's with you when you're at work. Allah's with you when you're with your children. Allah's with you when you're sleeping. Allah's with you when you're awake. That's taqwa. It's constant state of mindfulness. And to be mindful is the opposite of being heedless. Anybody know what ghafla is? Instead of ghafla, it's when you're heedless, when you don't know what's going on. Taqwa is the opposite of that. And so the person who's just paying to say taqwa, they're totally calm. You can throw this pen at them and they won't respond. Anybody can I try? You can do that though. Yeah, you're probably there. You can, kids, don't throw pens at your friends. You can do other things to them and they won't get bothered because they're completely calm. They're with Allah. Inna al-awliya illahi laa khopana layhum malahum yassunoon. The awliya of Allah, the friends of Allah, the saints of Allah, they don't fear or grieve. They don't trip. They don't worry. They don't stress. They're not always tripping about something. Anybody always stressed about something? Yeah, I am. I always do something or another. When you're a kid, you're just like, I remember when I was a kid, I was like so stressed out and someone asked me, like, why are you so stressed out? I was like, I forgot to turn in my library book. I thought it was the biggest deal in the world because I was gonna get a fine, right? You got, that was you? Yeah, all right, see? So that happens. Stresses happen at different levels. As you grow older and older, different stresses. But those who are close to Allah, they don't achieve any worry or any difficulty. So if we think then back to the goal of Ramadan, if we understand now the nafs, so who would revisit their goal? Would anybody change anything? Or anybody add anything to what they wrote for their goals for Ramadan? By the way, we have like way more of these sheets. If anybody wants them, please, please take them. Thank you to Zakkala Farim when you're back. And if anybody doesn't have them and any of the youth wanna pass them out, that would be awesome too for anyone you see that doesn't have them. All right, so we know now that the goal is to ascend in the levels of the nafs. We know that the, all right, so does anybody know then, other than Shaitan, what blocks us from ascending in the levels? Who knows what sin is, right? Doing something wrong. Every time you do something wrong, what happens in the video game? You're going up, you're going up, you're going up. Boom, you lose, you fail the level. Anybody just like lose the, you lost and you gotta start all over? That kind of happens when you sin. You don't have to start all over, but you just collapse. And now a darkness happens. If you imagine the heart as something very pure, every time we sin, the heart gets, am I being too loud? You sign? Okay, okay. If you sin, the heart gets a dark black spot. And when you do good deeds, it's based on hadith. If you do good deeds, the heart gets light. The more and more light it gets, literally the more and more light you get, you're more calm, you're more relaxed, you're more light versus the more and more dark you get, not light color, the more and more dark your heart gets, the heavier you get, the more stressed you get, the more worried you get, literally a heaviness overtakes the human being. And that is what blocks us from progress of the nus. So if we know then that taqwa is the goal, nus is the blocker. And sin is the thing that the nus uses to block us. Now we have to think, okay, what exactly is it that's preventing me? And so I want everybody to just take a minute and think about what blocked you last year from succeeding in Ramadan? Like what was it that blocked you? Was it, what part of your nus was it? What sin was it? What, you know, thing that in your life was it that prevented you from really succeeding or achieving the goals that you had in Ramadan? And then we'll have some folks share and we'll keep going. It'll just take like 30 seconds to a minute to write that down. And there's 10s up here for anybody who doesn't have a 10 or feel free to write this on your phone or somewhere else if you can. All right, anybody want to share what blocked them last year if we remember last year was a long time ago? Yes. All right, very good one, Hamdollah. People at school of peer pressure. What grade are you in? Seven, so last year in sixth grade. People at school of peer pressure, very, very common. Parents, do you guys know what goes down in school? I don't think I, most parents have no idea. School is like a war zone. It's like, public school is literally like a war zone. And when you go, especially in high school, your child is exposed to drugs, partying, and you'll think this is not my child. The one who thinks it's not their child, this is their child. I'm dead serious. If you have that thought that comes to your head because it's very difficult. Because you have no idea what your child is really doing on Instagram and Snapchat. I'm not gonna tell you right now. You have no idea who they're talking to, who they're sending DMs to, and blocking it is a forced way to stop it, but it won't solve the root of the problem. The root of the problem has to be solved. Parents have to have an open relationship with their children, where you have to openly discuss what exactly is it that's going on. That doesn't start in high school. Like, okay, I was intense and strict this whole time, never built a relationship. And now in ninth grade, I'm gonna be like, get that, let's go get some coffee. Not gonna work. You have to start this from a young age, but if she mentioned in school, the peer pressures. We work a lot with youth and with parents on school counseling and guidance and things like that as part of an organization. And one of the number one issues is that the parental child relationship doesn't really exist. And so children are flooding in difficulties, flooding in depression. They're drowning in sin. They're drowning in most people. I met this guy last night. I would never think that he's... I had a hunch, but I didn't really think that he was seeing stuff. But he's dating this girl. And his brother is like this young kid who looks really righteous and he's smoking a bunch of weed. Like, you have no idea. Because now these days, we'll talk about this later, but they have these little pens. They pen. Jewel pods. All right, she knows. Do you want to show us yours? No, I'm just kidding. I'm joking. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. I said, I'm keeping it light. I'm just messing with you. These pens that exist, there's jewel pods, et cetera. And we'll talk a little bit more about how to know what's going down. But just the fact that that stuff exists and asking your child right now in the middle of the workshop if they have a jewel won't help. You have to go home and you really have to think. He has one? No. Oh, no, no. I know I'm just messing with you. So she mentioned peer pressure. What else? What blocked you last year? Let's keep moving. Anything else that blocked anybody last year? Yes. Yep, yep. That makes sense. Just the busyness of work, the intensity of the schedule, for sure. I was right there with you. Definitely blocked me as well. Yes. Yep. So he said, after coming back from school, just dead tired, just want to sleep. Dude, join the club, right? That's very normal. You come back from work, you're tired in that prime time. Guys, the prime time for the ah is that time from us or to Margaret. That's the time in our tradition, spiritual risk is being distributed according to the ulama. Spiritual sustenance. That's the time for dua, for dikkur, for learning, and for a close relation with Allah. But we're so tired, it's difficult to do that. So even if we can do it for five, 10 minutes, it's helpful. Anybody else want to share? Yes. Commercials. Like advertisements, TV, okay. Yep, commercials, good. Again, not good. Thank you for sharing. Anybody else? Yes. Time management, okay. Very, very important. We're going to be getting into that as well. Anybody else? Last one, guys, come on. And men are angels. Men don't have anything. That's that. No challenges for the guys. The girls are just, you know, so much difficulty, so many challenges. The guys don't, no problems at all. Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah. Achieve wilaya. Alhamdulillah. Yes. Lunch hour at work. And so what was it? Just seeing everybody eat? Okay, that's very normal, right? Lunch hour at school and at work, very difficult because you see the food right in front of you. And we should just know that that amount that we resist with Allah, that's very precious. Every second of our resisting that food, he's writing immense reward for us. And immense light is being poured to bound upon our hearts because enough they want to eat. They smell something delicious, they want to engage, but we are holding ourselves back. So that's a very common challenge. So okay, that was what we blocked ourselves, what blocked us last year. So now let's think through what challenges we might be facing and depending on whatever level we may be at of our nuts. Just like with the levels of the nuts, there's also levels of the fast. Everybody's fast is not the same. The fast, again, of our grandmothers, very different than my fast, that much I know, because they're in a totally different state. They have a different house with Allah. Our deeds are not, one person could outwardly look the exact same, inwardly be completely in a different state than somebody else. And that's very, very important for us to keep in mind. So let's talk a little bit about the levels of fasting. So there are multiple levels when it comes to fasting. The first level is just staying away from food, drink, and intimacy. Nobody in Ramadan, does anybody like just eat a burger during the middle of the day? Nobody does that, right? Nobody just like, oh, I'm gonna just drink a bunch of water. Although if you did that, nobody would know, only Allah knows. So maybe some people do do that, right? But only Allah knows what you're doing. That's level one of the fasts. The person who they only fast from food, drink, and relations, and they don't fast from anything else, meaning they don't put in any extra effort. They're not trying to go to Taraweeh. They're not trying to do anything. They get very little from Ramadan. What did they get from Ramadan? Hunger and thirst. Haditha, Prophet Muhammad said, have you seen the one who all they get from their fasts is hunger and thirst? Because that's it. It's all you got. Because you didn't fast from anything else. Let's talk then about level two. Hadali defines, he has a book on inner dimensions of fasting, the secrets of fasting. So just like we have all these outward rules and thick of fasting, we also have inward rules of fasting, inward thick. We get closer to Allah through our fast. The second level of the fast is to fast from the eyes, from the ears, from the tongue, from the hand, from the feet, from the heart. There are different levels of fasting according to whatever challenges we're struggling with. So who can tell me what a fast of the eye might be? Not to see haram. Good. That's one level. That's like a good, that's a good level with regards to the eye. What's even better than that? We were talking about screens earlier, one of the young ladies mentioned screens. What's another level of fasting from the eye? Fasting from screens. We think the fast is just food. The fast is about a lot more than food. So the nuts, we learned that the nuts loves desire and the nuts loves food. Who knows what else the nuts loves? Does anybody, the nuts loves this thing. It loves, it loves scrolling on this. Just keep going, keep going, keep going. And that's it. It loves scrolling, it loves watching. The nuts loves watching TV, it loves watching video games, loves watching NBA, loves watching NFL, loves watching Game of Thrones, it loves watching YouTube, it loves watching YouTube stars. This YouTube star did some random new trick that you wanna look at that is exciting. The nuts loves that. So what's the nuts gonna do in Ramadan? It's gonna say, yo, you didn't give me any food all day. Just give me a little bit of Facebook time. You didn't give me any food all day. Give me a little bit of WhatsApp. Just spend some time exchanging jokes on WhatsApp in these groups. Everybody changes jokes from like Pakistan all back and forth to each other. Just give me a little bit of that. Give me a little bit of time exchanging, or sorry, give me a little bit of time just going through your snap story. It, not even a little bit because 10 minutes, 20 minutes turns into one hour, two hours, give me one episode. Just give me one episode of your favorite show because you'll stop meeting all day. That's enough. So the person who's on the second level of fast, they are stopping from food and also stopping from other things that they could be doing. That is when the fast starts to get beneficial. So they don't look at haram, alhamdulillah. Ideally, first thing you focus on the haram. So you stop looking at the haram. So if you're like struggling with looking at pornography or bad images, your fast reward is decreased completely. So imagine you have a big amount of reward and then you look at bad things, the reward goes like this and you talk bad about people, reward goes like this and then you do something else. Reward is eventually until the reward has gone completely. You can have people who fast all day and they get no reward. They're mean to this person. They're rude to that person. They say haram, they listen to haram, they do haram and may Allah protect us from that. So each limb then has a fast. The fasting of the ears to stay away from music. Anybody here struggle with listening to music? Yeah, it's very normal, totally fine to struggle. It's honest, open space. It's normal to struggle listening to music and Ramadan, challenge yourself. Take a break from your favorite song. Take a break from your iPod, from your iPhone, from your Spotify, from your Pandora, from whatever it is that you're listening to. Take a break. If you're gonna do it in the whole 30, take it for the first five and see how it feels. I remember the Ramadan still that I decided I wanted to pause the music. I used to love listening to Tupac, Biggie, Lil Wayne, all the hip hop stars. Loved it, all the time. I still have their songs memorized unfortunately. I wish I spent my time memorizing something better, but that's what I did. Anyways, but that Ramadan I was like, dude, I'm gonna change this because this is too much in my head. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna listen to some Beethoven. I know it's weird, but I was just like, I'm gonna listen to some classical music. I'm just gonna like, because I needed something, my enough needed to hear something. It didn't know how to be quiet. And I also worried that if I was quiet on my whole car ride home, I'd fall asleep. So I would listen to something classical or I'd talk to a friend on the phone instead of listening. After that Ramadan, I didn't have desire to go back to listening to Eminem anymore. I was like, dude, I don't need Eminem anymore. Eminem was somebody I needed before and now I don't need him. Because eventually you realize that, or and for a lot of us, it's not Eminem, it's that Bollywood singer who sings all the good songs. Atif Aslam and whatever, whoever our choice singer in our culture is, because if you're American, it might be Drake and Rihanna and Eminem and Beyonce, or it might be the favorite Arab singer or your favorite Dainty singer, your favorite Bollywood singer, whatever it is. We have to just take a break from your favorite song and you'll see the effect that it has on yourself. So then we have right down later on, not necessarily right now, whatever limb you struggle with and whatever challenge you might have in relation to that limb and then work on it. And one thing that's very, very, very important. So we were talking about level two. If we just go back to level one of the fast, who can tell me what level one of the fast is? What is it? Just stay away simply from hunger and food. And what's level two? One of the guys, what's level two? Stay away from your, from Haram at least, right? So touching the Haram, looking at the Haram, hearing the Haram, saying the Haram. What's one of the Harams that we say with our tongue? Bad words, cursing, good. I heard something else. Lying, gossiping, gossiping. We talk smack all the time about people. You don't even know, and most of the time we talk smack about people. We'll come home, we could have had it. And remember, keep this in mind, the nafs is trying to get you to do this. You fasted all day, you did Tarawee, the nafs is like, dude, give me something, come on. Let's just give me a little time. It wants you to give it something. Just talk bad about that one person at Tarawee who bothered you, you'd be like, oh my God, that guy, he kept swaying back and forth. You know the people who sway, kept swaying back and forth and he was just so, and you mentioning that, alas, backbiting has started, gossip enters, reward diminishes. You lose the bark of almost the whole fast because you decided to talk bad about the guy at the mosque who was swaying. You could have just kept your mouth shut. I know, because I've done this before. Or whatever situation it is, oh, this person next to me was so annoying. It doesn't have to be at the mosque, it could be at work, my boss. Most of us, we talk a bunch of smack about our boss all the time. We come home to our wife or to our husband and we're just, or to our kids. And your kids don't even care, and they're just like, you're just like, oh my God, my boss is always giving me so much work. He's so annoying. He's never on time. He doesn't know how to manage. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And boom, then after said, who knows what the, what the Prophet of the Sun said about backbiting? Do we know? Not only we're not interested in it. He said that the act of backbiting is worse than 40 acts or multiple acts of adultery. Who knows what adultery is? I don't want to get into it. So do people know what adultery is? Yeah, okay. All right, so imagine, this is a haq hadith. This is not like a fake thing whether it's an exaggeration or metaphor. No, it's worse than you going and sleeping with 40 different women or men. That's worse than backbiting. Yes, exactly. Yeah, oh, there's lots of, oh, lots of hadith about eating the flesh of your brother but eating the dead flesh of your brother. There's a lot of hadith about that as well. So it's, it's for us sometimes we can't visualize what eating the dead flesh of our brother looks like because none of us have probably ever done it. But we can very much visualize what I mentioned before it looks like, right? So there's lots of hadith about backbiting, right? The amount of reward it strips away. So we fast all day and then we talk bad about our boss all night or for two hours or for 10 minutes. Reward of the fast goes, reward of the fast. Or about our teachers. Oh my God, how my math teacher sucks. Oh my God, my math teacher just, she's terrible. He doesn't know how to teach. I don't know who hired her. My science teacher, terrible. I know this because I did it also, right? This is very normal. Yes, yeah, you can think it. Wow, what a beautiful question. Okay, so, so yes. So the question was, can you think it? Can you think this bad thought? So at the initial levels, yes, you can think it. The closer and closer one gets to Allah, the more they stop, there's a backbiting of the tongue, there's a backbiting of the heart. They eventually stop backbiting in their heart. That meaning they don't even think the bad thought. Because the Muslim is told to make, who knows how many excuses we're told to make for people. 73, 72 in some narrations, yeah. That means that we always make excuses for people. We see something, something one does wrong and we make an excuse, we make an excuse, right? And that doesn't mean that we make excuses for real wrong things, like abuse and not that type of stuff. Leave that stuff aside, but just for general small wrong things people do. So again, our tongue will slip. Complaining, all right, this is another big one. We complain a lot. So the tongue winds all the time. Oh my God, I'm so hungry. When is this fast gonna be done? I'm so thirsty. Wine, wine, wine, it's such a hot day. That's complaining. How is that complaining? Because Allah knows how easy or difficult it is for most of us to fast. In the Bay Area where we live, that's very easy to fast. We all have running water. We all have AC, we all have fans, we have cooling environments. Try fasting where many of our parents are from in Pakistan or in the Arab world or in places where load shedding happens or in difficult environments like this where there's no electricity. And then we'll see what complaint is valid and what complaint is not valid. Boom, every time we complain fast goes down, fast goes down. Even just complaining about something like traffic. Oh my God, there's so much traffic. Why am I stuck in traffic? Why is this going down? Dude, stop doing that. It's not nice. And just complaining, complaining, complaining. That, it's a trait we have to work on. We all do this. There's probably not a single, I'm the first admit I complain all the time. I definitely talk smack about people and I should not be talking smack. And I know I need to work on it. So this is coming to me first and foremost. But we all struggle with it, that's fine. The goal of this Ramadan is to work on it. So we have the eyes, we have the ears. And if I had more room, I would have written that down on the sheet, but sorry, I didn't get a chance. But you can write it down somewhere else. Write down a list of what we do with our eyes, with our ears, with our tongue that we should not be doing. So that's getting into the second level. The second level then is to eventually tame all of these different limbs that it is that we have. And just on a side note, if we're struggling at the first level and we are, let's say immersed in things, we shouldn't be immersed. So I'm not gonna ask who's doing this because you don't have to open up and reveal. But let's say you're dating somebody. Let's say you have a boyfriend, you have a girlfriend. Okay, you have it, accept it, it happens. Okay, in Ramadan, at the very least, if you wanna go and have a real Ramadan, at least tell your girlfriend or boyfriend, I'm gonna take a break. That you're not going to be engaged in that relationship. Take a break, right? And if you're not doing that, if you're still engaging in that relationship, that's a bad sign. Because the month of Ramadan is supposed to be a time where we take a break from these type of things. If you're gossiping all the time, we just mentioned this, don't hang out with the people who you gossip with. So at school, if you mention this peer pressure or bad things that are happening, take a break from those people. If that works, there are people who talk smack all the time, right? I just had a situation this week where somebody in our company got laid off and senior person and everybody like, and I made the mistake of asking someone what they thought and ooh, here we go. The backbiting train opened up and I was like, I shouldn't have done that. Because now we're just gonna gossip about this guy. And so it's very, very important to know what it is that we struggle with. If you're struggling with drugs, if you're with your children and parents or children who are here, you might not be, or students, younger students, you might not be, but you know friends who are. I'm sure every single person in this room knows somebody who's probably smoking, drinking, losing fuel or a vape or something or another. It's important for us to relay this message back to them and say, look, man, I know you're struggling with this, just like let's talk about it. Why are you doing this? What is it that drives you to smoke all the time? Is it that you have a bad relationship with your parents? Many times it is. Is it that you have a bad relationship with your siblings? Is it that you're just depressed? Is it that you just see it because everybody else is doing it? And our goal should be to at least give up those things in this Ramadan, right? To take a break and give up whatever it is that we are engaging in. Because this industry and this society will do whatever it takes to get our children, to get our youth to be involved in drugs, to be involved in vaping. Now weed is legal in California. You see billboards all over the place. The joule, the vape, the joule pen is not regulated. It's not like tobacco, but it's worse than tobacco in terms of addiction levels. And they market it to youth and they're allowed to because there's no government regulation. So guaranteed, one of your children, God forbid, or nephews or nieces or somebody might be engaged in that. And it's upon us to first learn and have that conversation about how do we stop. So anyways, that happens level one, level two, level. Now let's say you go past the basics and you stop all the sins of the limb. Now it gets a bit more refined. At the higher levels, the fast gets about, okay, how do you manage your time? You're fasting, you're not talking bad about people, you're going to Taraweeh, but you have more time. So who wants to do a khatam of Quran in Ramadan? Anybody have that goal? Finish one Quran? All right, Hamdallah, anybody wanna finish two? Anybody wanna finish three? No, it's okay, okay, so the reason I'm asking, because the goal about time management, I know people who finish three to four Quran's in Ramadan while doing everything else. No, it's difficult, but that struggle is required. So at the higher levels, now the goal becomes more refined. How are you managing your time? It takes 20 minutes to read one juz. 30 minutes, 40, or sorry, 20 minutes to read his, maybe a juz for somebody who reads fast, or one sabbara, one chapter, right? 30 minutes, 40 minutes to read a whole chapter. We have a lot of time during the day. Just your commute time alone, you take part or you take the bus. Can be used wisely, if you read Quran for half that time or most that time. If you drive to school or drive to work, listening to a talk, listening to a spiritual lecture is using that time-wise. Level one, we talked about, we talked about level two. Now level three, the goal is to refine more and more. So use that time at work wisely. Use that lunch break to not just see everybody eating the food, but to go for a walk and do some dhikr or to go pray doha in the masjid or to go and just pray in and of itself, right? Or to go and have a time where you just sit and you make doha to Allah. Whatever it is that we can do, that's one of the goals. The second goal in this level is to, maybe we have a bunch of goals but we don't know how to meet them. This is very normal. As you get closer and closer in the spiritual path, you start setting more and more goals, bigger and bigger goals. I wanna do a thousand salawat a day. I wanna do a thousand la ilaha illallah a day. I wanna read this book. I wanna read that book. And then just like nothing happened because it's really difficult because Shaitan was training the nuts all before Ramadan started to figure out how do you mess up and how am I gonna make sure that you're not productive? So the goal then at this point is to refine ourselves further and further until we start to set higher goals and stretch goals. Who knows what a stretch goal is? Anybody play, or anybody lift or go to the gym? Work out, you lift or go to the gym? All right, so you ever like have like a goal? Okay, I wanna go up like 10 pounds on the bench or 20 pounds. Right, so if you just lift the same weight every day, will you get to your max? Small increments, exactly, small increments. So the goal in Ramadan is to set small increments and then to eventually achieve these stretch goals. So now I want us to take a second and write down step three here is any challenge that we have. This could be a sin that we're doing. This could be difficulties or mental block. Who knows what an invisible script is? Anybody know? An invisible script is something like you tell yourself, well, I never really prayed the Hajj so I guess I can't really do it. That's an invisible script because you think you never did it, you can't do it. Or like, I don't really look the part, I don't really have a beard so I can't be religious. That's no criteria at all of being religious but let's just say you have that invisible script or like, I guess I don't really, I don't wear hijab so like I can't do all these other things because I don't even do this. Like you set these scripts, they're fake script for yourself and but you'll set them. Write down what your invisible scripts are or I never was religious when I was a kid. Everybody told me I wasn't religious so why should I be religious now? That's an invisible script. So any invisible script, mental block or big sins or challenges that you have in this step three takes some time. There's space for two or three of them. Just write them down and then we will inshallah share them and we're almost done and then we'll move on to question and answer inshallah. So again, mental blocks, invisible scripts and challenges that we might be facing. All right, anybody, and you don't have to openly share anything, you're not comfortable, but anybody have mental block or challenge that they wanna share that they're comfortable. Yes, very good. Did anybody hear that? If you don't pray on time, you might as well just not pray at all. Very good. So that's an invisible script. How would you work on that? Yep, good. Right, she said that if you, everybody hear what she said? If you, even if you slip up, let's say you don't pray and your nuts tells you, dude, you didn't pray anyways. Why are you gonna, what's the point of making it up? The goal there is to fight with yourself and say, no, I have to make it up because that prayer is gonna, I'm gonna be held accountable for that prayer and you don't want later in life to have to make up like five, six, seven years of prayer. That's thousands and thousands of prayers. You don't wanna have to do that later in life. So you should do it right away. Good. What's another invisible barrier? Mental barrier, yeah. If when I'm fasting, nobody's watching me. So if I eat, why does it matter? Very good. So that is very normal and the way around that is the more and more you get closer to Allah, the stakwa comes in, right? Where you see that Allah is watching you, the angels that are here and here are watching you. But that's a good one. Thank you for sharing. Anybody else? We'll say one more guys. Mental barrier, challenge that you might have, something you're struggling with. And again, if you have something that's like deep that you might not be comfortable sharing but you think it would be beneficial for people to hear, please do share so that other people can, yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing. So I've already sinned. Why won't I just do it again? I already like looked at every other girl that was walking in front of me or every other guy that was walking in front of me. What is one lowering gaze gonna do? I already listened to like 20 songs. What's one more song? I already, right? Smoke, like 20 joints. What's one more joint? Whatever it is, right? I already had a relationship with three girls. What's one more girl? What's one more guy? What's one more boyfriend gonna do, right? That's very, those are very normal whispers that Shaytan says. Yes. I'm so sinful. Why would Allah forgive me? Who's heard that in their head before? I know I have. I'm so sinful. Like just dude, what's the point? Just give up. Why did Allah forgive me? These are mental barriers. Now that we've noted these down, it's important because we're getting somewhere with this. If we flip to the next page, we're gonna talk a little bit about what it is that we want to actually work on. So at level one, level two, level three, we defined what are the different challenges that we have. There's a higher level. The highest level of the fast is the fast of the elect of the elect. Their fast is, so the first fast is broken when you eat something. The second fast is broken when you eat something, but the reward is gone when you do something haram or do something bad. The third fast, you start to feel the reward going when you don't use your time wisely when you're not beating your goal. Because you're stretching yourself. You're working out more. You're achieving more. The higher level of the fast is that you fast from all thoughts other than the thought of Allah. Meaning if you think of anything other than Allah, the fast breaks in your mind, not in sickness. The fast is still accepted, but for that person, for the one who is in that state, their fast is in their mind, they lost their reward. Then just thinking about what they're gonna eat, samosas or pakoras or biryani at Iftar, that's it. The fast is broken for them because they thought about other than Allah. This is the highest level. Ghazali says the fast of the elite of the elite. And the reason we should just know this, and I'm sure there are some people in this room who probably achieved this and please teach us how we can do that. We should just know about this so that we can have 20 minutes of Ramadan, one day of Ramadan, half a day, two hours a day, some portion of our time that we achieved this fast. We just sit and we just only think about Allah. Frankly, sometimes we're in our prayer and we think about everything other than Allah. We think about our lunch and this and our work and what we have to get done in our homework. So this fast is broken by any thought other than Allah and it's reserved for the elect but all of us can achieve it. Can anybody not achieve it? We already talked about this but is there anybody who thinks they can't achieve that? Is it possible? You don't think you can do it? You can do it. Yeah. Maybe not this Ramadan but eventually they're a beautiful point, right? The question was how are you gonna do that if you have life to live? You gotta be at work. You gotta be, this is a beautiful state that the few people who reach it, they are engaged completely in the world but their heart is, it's a very hard to explain. Their heart is with Allah. Their breaths are with Allah. Every breath they take is thicker but they're still engaged. They're still at work. They're still driving. They're still testing. They're doing everything. The more closer and closer the more and more thicker that we do, the more the nafs is tamed, the more we get some with my Inna, the more we get to state of Takwa, the easier this becomes, right? But it's just important for us to know so maybe one day later in life inshallah that we can achieve it. All right, so we wrote down what some of our challenges were and what some of our mental blocks were and then we talked about what some of the levels were. So now who's in high school here? High school, high school, all right, high school. Okay, so thank you all for taking the time on a Friday night to come. That's, alhamdulillah, may Allah reward you and increase you for doing that. There are specific things in high school. I just wanted to briefly touch on this because you all took the time to come that we struggle with. In high school, very, very specific things, right? So we already talked about it being in relationships, smoking, drinking, gossiping, partying. Those are all normal temptations but then there's other temptations that open up or other difficulties from it on. Like, does anybody have a hard time studying? Yeah, anybody have a hard time just juggling all the work that they have to do or remembering to pray because you're so busy with work? These are all very normal things. So write these down as your challenges and then just a few tips on how to work through this. First is, when it comes to studying during Ramadan in parents, for any of your children, whether they're in elementary, middle, or high school, it's important at a young age to teach them that Ramadan is not a burden and it is not a month where everything stops, right? Sometimes like you go to the Muslim world and like everything stops. Everything's closed in Ramadan, everybody's just, and it's supposed to be because they're supposed to be doing bikr but they're just sleeping and watching tele-dramas, right? And it's the reality of the situation in a lot of places. Ramadan is supposed to be a month where we're doing our best at work in school but our heart is with Allah. We're not only focusing on work in school. It's not the month that we put in the long hours of work. We said we put in the long hours for praying Ta'awi and for fasting but when it comes to school, the first thing that we can do is just create a schedule. So that's gonna be step five, we'll talk about this but I would highly recommend for those who are in high school just note down a few pieces of homework that you can do on the weekend when you've gotten enough rest, how you can get ahead with your studying when you are early in the morning or in the evening after Iftar, even if you cannot make it to Ta'awi but you have to focus on your homework, that's totally fine. Do not feel pressured to have to do a bunch of things only because you think that's what, you know, your parents telling you have to do a final season. I get it. Final season, school takes priority over extra Ibada. School is the Ibada because you're learning what the intention to eventually become, have the ability to serve Allah in His creation. That's your intention. If you're just wasting time watching, you know, Game of Thrones or Snapchat, then of course, then you should go to Ta'awi. But if you can go to eight Ta'awi and go and focus on the rest of school or only go to Ta'awi on the weekends and study in the evenings, that's fine. It's even better if you can manage your time to study during the day. So that's one thing when it comes to doing your homework, I know this is gonna sound kind of like not a very practical solution but if you sincerely make da'a, then Allah opens up your heart, it opens up your productivity. Has anybody experienced more productive time in Ramadan than they do outside of Ramadan? All right, good. You were in high school and you raised your hand. How did that manifest? What did you experience? I'm gonna love, beautiful, right? So he said that he just kept going for whatever it is that he was supposed to be doing. And because he plays Ta'awi, instead of engaging and watching TV or going on social media or Netflix or this situation. Anybody else who is more productive in Ramadan, maybe at work or school? It's very possible, right? If you, Imam al-Qazali defines 10 benefits of hunger among one of the benefits he said is mental clarity and insight is sharpened. And it's easier to actually focus when hunger, it tames the rest of the body. So in the first five, 10 days, we have our headaches, caffeine headaches, it's difficult. That's normal. Let that time pass and use the rest of the time to really function at your best. Assuming you can get enough sleep, right? If you have to adjust your schedule a little bit, assuming you can get enough sleep, it's very actually beneficial to do homework or to study while you're fasting. Push yourself or I'm gonna challenge the high schoolers five days of Ramadan. Push yourself to do it when it's really hard. I guarantee you the inshallah, the rest of the days will be easy. If you push yourself in the first five, 10 days. But if you struggle in the first five, 10 days and you sleep and you don't work on your homework and you don't study, it gets very difficult for the rest of Ramadan. All right, so we talked a bit about high school and then does anybody here have a job go to the office? Everybody else? Doesn't have a job? Can you tell me what to do? That'd be awesome. Alhamdulillah. So the guys also don't have jobs. Wow, this is awesome. All right, anyways, you go to work. Okay, who struggles with fasting at work? I know I do. It's difficult, right? What's difficult at work? It's difficult to manage your time. It's difficult to pray sometimes. It's difficult to take breaks in the day to do ibadah. It's difficult to just use your time wisely. So a few practical tips of what we can do at work. One is make a schedule for yourself. So we talked about this before. We have commute time in the morning. We have time at lunch. We have time in the afternoon. We definitely have time while everybody else is like, and I'm sorry to be explicit, everybody else that go into the restroom and stuff. We don't have to do that when we're fasting, most of us. So you have like 20, 30 minutes a day that you save, right? All that time can be time that goes to ibadah. Everybody who has a smartphone who has Facebook, there's another app called the Quran. You can download the Quran. I don't mean that in a condescending way. I'm serious. You download the Quran and you read that. It's all the time you spend scrolling in between meetings. You just spend it scrolling with Allah's book and watch how much you get done or listening to a talk that's beneficial. That's one thing that we can do practically at work. Another thing that we should do is have a conversation with our boss. So all of us were in Silicon Valley, fairly flexible valley. People are pretty chill. If you wanna work from home or if you wanna have a adjusted hour. So if you wanna go in at 10, 10, 30 and leave at 6, 6, 30, especially most of those who are older or senior, your boss will not care. Maybe you don't even have a boss and you are a boss. It shouldn't matter, right? You can adjust your hours at work and I guarantee you that the Hadith Prophet Salaam said, the one who makes all of their aspiration in this life, one aspiration, which is the aspiration of the year after, Allah takes care of all their other goals. What does that mean? That means for all the extra time that one has, if they focus that, not on social media, not on television, not on gossiping, not on talking to friends, not on just reading the news, not on watching the news, not on watching what's happening between Pakistan and India, not on doing all of that. But instead on Allah, on worshiping Allah, on thinking about Allah, what happens? Then the most important thing that happens at that point is Allah takes care of all your other goals. That means that in the 12 hours or 10 hours or eight hours you put in the day at work, Allah will make it possible for you to get all that work done in four to five hours. I'm not saying it, it's the promise of something, said it because you prioritize Allah. The rest of the hours that Allah freed up, you gave to Him. You read Quran, you worship, you took some time to drive to the mosque, even though it was an eight minute drive from your office or to walk to the mosque or whatever it is, to pray the heart. Because you did it for Allah, Allah will do things for us. And if we set this precedent, our children and the younger generation will see, okay, things, they had a different approach. They weren't just chasing after money or chasing after fame, they were chasing after Allah. And so Allah made things easy for them. And finally, we already talked about gossiping at work and anything else. Is there anything else that for those Masha'Allah who have been working for a while that you would like to share with the rest of the other advice you think that could be helpful for us to hear of how we could benefit at work in Ramadan, how we could use our time wisely or tax that you might have yet. So he said Ramadan is good time to do Dawah. So to let people know what you're doing and why it's happening. My wife sent an email once to her colleagues at work letting them know about Ramadan. And then she sent it to me and like guy, I just copy pasted the email and changed the name of the company and sent it to my office. And everybody loved it. Her work and my work was just explaining what Ramadan is, what we're gonna be doing this month, you know, how they can, if they wanna participate. I had two people in my job two years ago who did the whole fast. One like white girl and one Asian guy. Totally like non-Muslims for it. And they just fasted the whole, they woke up at four o'clock first area, they were texting me. And then they ate the star. One of them waited outside a restaurant for 30 minutes at Iftar time so we could open the interview so hungry. But people will do that. And if Allah sees someone doing that, maybe Allah will forgive them on the day of judgment because they engage in an act of worship. So now briefly what would be helpful is we know whether we're in work, whether we're in school, whatever phase of life we're in, what we're struggling with. Just take some time to write down, this is four sections here. Two good deeds that we wanna focus on this Ramadan. Two bad deeds that we wanna give up. So good deed is like, okay, I wanna read more Quran. And I wanna read the English translation of Quran. Or I wanna be nice to my parents or I wanna help out at the mosque. A bad deed that we give up, we know, I wanna stop talking bad, I wanna stop being rude to people. And then, and the third is two traits of the heart that we wanna work on. So this is beyond just a deed. This is what we mentioned earlier, like anger, like patience, like gratitude. The heart has deeds just like this, the tongue and the hand have deeds. So we should be considering how to work on the deeds of the heart as well. So write down two of those. And then finally, this one I think is the most important in our time is two screens you wanna limit. So your phone, your TV, we should make this a screenless Ramadan. Wallahi, if we made this a screenless Ramadan, lighten, the Muslim ummah would change completely. See, because we spend so much time on our screens. Ramadan is not supposed to be the nuts we'll convince you as we mentioned earlier to trade off. Take some time away. Obviously, if you go on your laptop at work, I'm not mentioning that, I'm not talking about that. I mean TV, I mean news, I mean Netflix, I mean Hulu, I mean HBO, I mean Xbox, I mean PS4, I mean all the, you could list Facebook, iPhone, your Galaxy, whatever it is that you have. So write down two screens that you wanna limit and what you wanna turn off, whether you wanna turn off Snapchat, turn off Facebook, turn off WhatsApp. We should turn off at least one of them. If not all of them, and just see how it goes. Nothing's gonna change. Your life is gonna be great. Nobody's gonna be upset if you didn't like their status. Maybe one person will be upset but you can tell them hey, I'm sorry I didn't like your status. Yeah, and so let's take some time to write this down and then we're done almost. Yeah, this is a step four by the way. Sorry about that. Step four on the screen. Yeah, good question. So the question was, we have testing in school. How am I gonna do well on the test if I don't, if I'm feeling headaches or if I'm feeling different? Very good question and thank you for asking. So first thing, keep in mind that if you're sincerely doing this for God, He's gonna help you with the testing. You have to make sure you're making du'a to Allah every morning and every night. Ya Allah, help me with the test. Don't let me feel the difficulty of the fast during the test. And maybe for one or two days you'll feel it, the rest will be easier. Second, keep in mind that there's the small test and there's the big test. So you're gonna stand in front of God on the Day of Judgment. He's gonna be like, how did you do on the big test? And he's gonna give you a report card. So even if you might've gotten like a B on this test and you get an A on that test, it's a great trade because this test is only temporary and that test is permanent. So just keep that perspective in mind that the hereafter is what I'm focused on and obviously do well in this life. Focus on your test. Ask your teacher maybe for a little bit of adjustment if you can, but most of the time it's very possible to get through. Ask your parents what they did when they were in school. Ask some of the youth here afterwards what they do with their test. But it's very possible and you're in seventh grade, right? Yeah, so most of your tests don't count right now, don't worry, you're good. Star test all the stuff doesn't count for anything, don't worry, test all that stuff, yeah. So please write this up down. Yeah, go ahead. Yes, I believe it's your mom. She said eat a good sahur, right? So if you can't eat at 4 a.m., unfortunately that's not a good excuse. Just force yourself to eat something that you enjoy, not cocoa pebbles because that's candy but something wholesome like eggs and toast and fruits and things like that and you'll get, your mom knows, handa la, handa la. Okay, so anybody wanna share what they wrote down for like one of these categories? Who wants to share a screen that they're gonna limit? I'm sorry, we're going a little long. I'm sure this is getting tiresome this Friday. Anybody want a screen? Yes, you're gonna limit TV, handa la, good. Anybody else? You wanna share? No, what? Oh, your phone, perfect, okay, good. And any apps on your phone you're gonna limit? Or just the phone in general? Okay, yeah, computer, okay, good. Like video games and stuff like that, computer games. YouTube, yep, for sure dude, I feel that. Anything else? Yeah, Facebook, very good, very good. Texting, social media, in the red, yeah. Very good, very good, thank you so much. But the point there mainly just, we know fasting is good for us. It's gonna be a lot easier to get through it. It's like you're almost through this evening. Three more minutes and then we're done. Think about Ramadan like that. You're gonna get through it, inshallah. Yes, it is translated in English. And so he has, the book I mentioned called Disciplining the Soul, it's available online. You can get it on Amazon, yeah, in English. And it's part of his larger book called The Ehiya al-Lumuddin, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, 40 books, all on how to improve ourselves. And that book is, after the Quran and the Hadith, that book is sufficient. That's all we need to travel to Allah. That's what the scholars say. So he is a bunch of them, they're translated to English by a few different publishers. Excellent books, highly recommend them. And there's a bunch of lectures, YouTube, et cetera, that talk about a lesson on them as well. You can get most of them on Amazon. Anything that's been translated, you can get on Amazon. Or Rumi Bookstore, exactly, around the corner. They have it, he does, he has excellent books. He's very good. So we're at time now, just briefly. Did anybody have any questions? There was one last part I wanted to get through, I don't think right at the time. Anybody have any questions about what we discussed, or generally about the thick of Ramadan that they're confused about? Random trivia, if you don't wake up a savour, you still have to fast. Yes. Some people think you don't, oh, I didn't wake up a savour, I don't want to fast today. If you don't know that the sun has set, but some random calendar said the sun has set, should you wait a minute or two? You should consider waiting a minute or two. All the calendars, MCC adds three minutes to their calendar, a lot of other messages don't. Just wait two, three minutes. The astronomical sunset is different than the Islamic sunset. So what comes on your iPhone weather app is not the sunset. We add three minutes to that according to our scholars. It's fine if we didn't know that before, but just small things. But anybody have questions? Questions, questions? Sorry, if you forget and you drink, it's wave. So if you forget and you drink some food or eat something, I remember when I was a kid, I was like cleaning something up and I saw some food, and of course I was a stupid kid, and I was like, first of all, I shouldn't have been eating the food, but I did it and then I forgot, so it's forgiven. But if, oh yeah, if you make an accident, this is a long story, we'll spare that. Stay away from anything doubtful. Don't use mouthwash, doubtful. Brush your teeth before, so who will end? So Kaha say afterwards, when the toothpaste goes in, the fast is gone. So be very, very careful if you're so worried about your breath smelling bad. You can use a miswak, but toothpaste should be used according to most of the schools, before the theory period, the sewer period and not well afterwards. But other scholars have other opinions. If you spend the whole weekend sleeping, depends on what level you're trying to be at. So if you spend the whole weekend sleeping and instead of you would have been clubbing, it's good. If you spend the whole weekend sleeping and you could have been doing something better, it's bad. It depends on where you're at. Hardest pull of those. So you can, it would be actually helpful for on our own time to take some time and write down every limb and think through all of the things that we can come up with. I'm not qualified to answer that. I don't know, I don't know. Everybody has their own standards of discipline. That sometimes, if someone earns it, sometimes they don't. I have no view on that. If it gets to, if somebody abuses, that's a different, right? If someone gets to the point of abuse, it's a little, I have no qualifications to speak on anything else. Yeah, it's like, if somebody like, has major signs of black eyes and bloody noses or like a wife has that sign or child has that sign, that's fetch only abuse or someone's been tortured or just excessive violence, that would be considered that type of situation. Any other questions, questions or anything that we, So the question was, how did the process of the question was about the more worship, the better generally? So we actually have a principle in our religion that it's not the quality, the quantity, it's actually the quality of worship. So if you pray for Rakat that are focused, it's much better than praying 12 Rakat that are not focused, right? It's very, very important to keep that in mind. Obviously the tarawih is slightly different. It's hard to focus at times, but the benefit of the Quran being recited is, you know, there, but if there are some nights you don't go to tarawih and you just want to engage in prayers with your Lord, there's some other process on this to do that. So generally what, from my understanding, what the process of someone would do is we know that Ramadan has phases, has types of days, right? So we had the first 10 days or days of mercy, the second 10 days or days of forgiveness, the last 10 days or days of freedom from the hellfire. So he would orient his community around those days. Every single day he would be waking up at the Hajj, regardless of being in Ramadan or not. So he would go to sleep slightly after Isha and he would wake up about three to four hours after sleeping and he would pray for almost three hours in the night. And then he would sleep a little bit more and then pray at Fajr, wake up for Fajr prayer. So that's his practice outside of Ramadan. I don't know too much exactly in Ramadan, outside of he established the tarawih. He didn't go every night to the communal tarawih because he didn't want the community to think as far. So he would pray on his own. In the last 10, so they say at the beginning of Ramadan, the Prophet ﷺ would tighten his belt. And in the beginning of Ramadan, he would start to take things really seriously. In the last 10 nights, he would really tighten the belt. So in the last 10 nights, he would go in Itzikah, he stayed away from intimacy with all of his wives and he was only in worship, meaning nobody bothered him. He was in a complete, and Itzikah is different than the Itzikah we do in the mosques now, where people are talking and hanging out and there's phones, I mean, he was in Dikr, whatever he was in, only Allah knows what he was doing in his beautiful Itzikah, right? So we should take portions of the sunnah, have a portion at least one day where we can just be with Allah one night where we just stay up the whole night. He would stay up the whole night often, right? We should have portion, everything we discussed in the levels of fasting, that's all based on the time of fasting some day, right? Everything Mammal Ghazali talks about is based on sunnah. So primarily we're pulling from him. Does that generally help? We should just take portions of what we can do and what we can handle and focus on quality over quantity. Yes, yeah. Have you thought about it yourself? Are you understand that? You haven't thought about it yet? Okay, no, so that's a good question. So it's important, just take some time to think about it and then share it with your friends, whether they're at your school or other schools, it's good to share whatever you think of with your friends. So first is if you don't want to be around them because you definitely don't want to watch them eat or you don't want to watch them talk about people or whatever it is, it's good to have whatever goals you write down here, right? And here we didn't get to the step five, but it's a whole calendar. Make a calendar for yourself and write down, okay, if I have a goal, I want to read the English Quran translation or I want to read the Arabic Quran or I want to do this. Ask a teacher for a room during lunchtime and say, hey, can I just have this room? And then whether you do homework, whether you read a book for class, whether you read some Quran, whether you prayed the horror with whatever you can do, just use that time to do it. But try to be by yourself if you can. And if you need to hang out with everybody else, that's fine also, but just, you know, you're gonna have to resist obviously the lure for food and tell your classmates ahead of time, like, hey guys, it's Ramadan, like, and they'll be like, oh my God, even water. And you'll be like, yeah, even water, I can't drink exactly, right? So they'll say all that, but you know, do what you can and stay away from, sorry, if you want to stay away from people, you know, go ahead and do that. Ask your teacher for a classroom and yeah, that should help. And take whatever goals. And homework is an excellent thing to do. You're in ninth grade, 10th, 11th, 10th SAT prep. I mean, whatever you can do, use that time to go in the classroom and do work. Even if you have to, you know, listen to some talk or something like that, just occupy the time, right? Go ahead and do that. Yes, very good point. Yes, your teacher that you do that? Great, that's beautiful, right? That's good, Alhamdulillah, yeah. Good, talk to the teacher, let them know, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Alhamdulillah, beautiful, masha'Allah. May Allah bless you, Yasmeen. May Allah ennoble you and make you from these close students. Masha'Allah, masha'Allah, beautiful. May Allah bless you, masha'Allah. And one thing, even if you're in high school and if you just ask your teacher for room, just go to sleep on the desk. I mean, whatever you can do, really, like it's better to sleep than to watch people eat food, right? You know what I mean? Yasmeen won't need to sleep, I doubt it, but, you know, in high school, that comes. So, Alhamdulillah, the last one thing I wanna say, did anybody know how to get the reward for Hajj and Umrah in Ramadan, or outside of Ramadan, without actually going to Hajj and Umrah? Ishraq, yeah, so yeah, exactly. So to stay, the Prophet ﷺ said, the one who stays up from Fajr, until Ishraq, they get the reward of a complete Hajj and Umrah, and they stay up from Fajr, they read Quran, they do some dhikr, they listen to a talk with something spiritual, they think about Allah, they think about all their blessings, they get the reward of a complete Hajj and Umrah, and in Ramadan, that's multiplied by 700 times. So if you just do that on the weekends, and do that in two days of the weekend, that's 1400 Hajj and Umrahs, and for four weekends in a row, that's more than 3000. And if you do that every single day of Ramadan, or if it's your summer break or something, that's a lot of Hajj and Umrahs in your belt. So, under your belt, these are real, this is not fake. So, it's very difficult for the nafs to stay awake from Fajr until Ishraq. We should make that a challenge, at least on the weekends when we can sleep in, to just stay awake. We have to get over this, wake up for Sahur, eat in 10 minutes, pray a quick Fajr and just go back to bed. Until we get over that, we can't defeat the nafs. The nafs wants to do that. We have to go and try to do more. We should at least sit for 10, 15 minutes after Fajr, make some dua, read some Quran, do something and then go back to sleep. Allah will again assist us with the spiritual energy that will help us out So, that's the last question. I'll go ahead. So, it depends on the seriousness of the medication, but if you have to take it through your mouth and it, so there's like, let's say you have a disease that prevents you from fasting, like diabetes. Where most of the ulema say, if you have an intense type of diabetes, that you actually should not fast. It's haram for you to fast because you are going to compromise your health. And Islam health is higher than preserving your own, you could say, worship you think you need to do. Health is more important than the sharia, than that, right? But if the qualified Muslim doctor has to tell you that, not a non-Muslim, because a non-Muslim will tell you, oh, break your fast, doesn't matter. Qualified Muslim doctor has to tell you that if you have to take medicine during the day and it's through the mouth, it's going to break the fast. That much we know. If it's through other means, like some allow for injections, some of the school is different depending on the school of thick, some allow for nose drops and ears drops and eye drops depending on the school of thick. Most don't allow for nose though, because it goes into the cavity then it's questionable. So it depends on your situation. If you have a really serious disease, you have to talk to a scholar and a doctor and ask them and have this discussion with them about the medicine. If you're just trying to take allergy medicine or Tylenol or something, or even something for another thing, you have to take it during the morning. Otherwise it will violate fast. But again, you have to talk to a scholar, I'm not a scholar. Oh, that's a really good question. Sadia, do you know if inhaler breaks the fast? Yeah, your teacher will understand. Especially, I mean, you're an element, sorry, middle school, your teacher should understand that they can't force you to do anything. Yeah, you should be totally fine. And if you ever get in a situation where your health is compromised, it's total, it's haram for you to not break the fast. So you have to break the fast. If you get a really high fever, you need to break your fast. If you get a, assuming it's really, really high, if you need to drink water because you're gonna die of dehydration, you need to break your fast. If you need to take an inhaler because you're gonna have an attack, you need to take your fast. If you have an allergic reaction to something and you need to take something, you need to break your fast. That makes sense. So there's a lot of room. This religion is easy. It's not supposed to be restrictive. It's supposed to be easy, but we have to learn what the component is. Alhamdulillah. And did you have, okay, last question. Alhamdulillah, may Allah bless you, may Allah bless you. So, okay, so here's the thing, so here's the thing. So swimming in 95, again, I'm not a scholar, 95% of chance of swimming is gonna break your fast. So once you know that, then unless you're not fasting, it's that time where you're not fasting in that time of the month. Other than that, you shouldn't be swimming. We have to, once we orient ourselves towards a framework where the hereafter is more important, Allah will assist us in all this and it will become easy for us. But if we worry about what's gonna happen in a specific situation, Allah will make your swimming easy. He'll make your school easy if you prioritize Him. You know, so inshallah, He'll make it easy for you. Yeah, and it goes in your mouth too, right? When you're, I swim, I mean, I don't swim on the team, but I used to swim a lot in college too. And I know, right, the water, yeah, I love swimming, but it's hard, right? In Ramadan, you can't, you can't. Other types of working out, you can do. Just do it right before iftar or right after iftar so that you don't, you know, dates get dehydrated, but yeah. Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah, inshallah. We'll end with the Dua. And, Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. Alhamdulillah, Rabul Alameen. Salatu wa salam, ala Sayyidina Muhammad wa alayhi wa sahbihi wa salam, al-Mahineen. Rabbana taqabal minna innaq anta sami olalim. Matub alayna ya maulana innaq anta tawab al raheem. Rabbana atina fiddun ya hasnata mafil aafin. Ya Aziz, Ya Ghaffa, Ya Arkham al Raheem, Ya Allah. We ask that you, Ya Allah, pardon us and forgive us and make this Ramadan the best Ramadan that we ever had, Ya Allah. We ask that you open us for, open for us our hearts, Ya Allah. Allow us to ascend in the levels of the nafs until we attain nafs al-Mutma inna nafs al-Kamila, Ya Rabb al-Alamin. Ya Allah, allow us to attain a state of taqwa that is pleasing to you, Ya Allah. Allow us to be, Ya Allah, the best servant to you, Ya Allah. Ya Allah, please be happy with us, Ya Allah. Please be content with us, Ya Allah. Please forgive us, Ya Rabb al-Alamin, Ya Allah. Please forgive us in this blessed month, Ya Allah. Ya Allah, we ask that you accept, Ya Allah, whatever it is that we're trying to do to get close to you, Ya Allah, and that you pardon whatever mistakes that we are making, Ya Rabb al-Alamin. Ya Allah, we ask that you put immense barakah for us and for our families and for our siblings and for our loved ones and for all of those who attended and for all of those in this community and for all of those in the ummah of Sayyidina Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, Ya Allah, that you put immense barakah in this month, Ya Allah. Assist us with your nur, Ya Allah. Assist us with your nafahat, Ya Allah. Assist us with your gentle breezes, Ya Rabb al-Alamin. Ya Allah, gaze upon us in this month. Give us another from your Divine Presence, Ya Rabb al-Alamin, Ya Allah. And make this the month, Ya Allah, that we turn to you completely, sincerely, and we come out completely reformed beings, Ya Allah. And bless all of the blessed youth and the children who attended today and who are in this community and relieve them of all their difficulties in school and all of the challenges that they are struggling with, Ya Rabb al-Alamin. And bless all of our parents and all of our mothers and all of our fathers and forgive them for any mistakes or relapses that they have made, Ya Allah. And forgive us for any mistakes that we may make as children, Ya Rabb al-Alamin, Ya Allah. And we ask you for immense blessings upon the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, Ya Allah. Give us a portion of fasting like he fasted, Ya Allah, with ease though, Ya Allah. Give us looks and apia in this Ramadan. Make this Ramadan extremely easy for us, but let us push ourselves, Ya Allah. Give us the himma to push ourselves to new limits in this month. Wa sallallahu wa sallim wa barik Alaa Sayyidunam Muhammad wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim Alhamdulillah, Rabb al-Alamin, Al Fatiha. The last thing is that the Ulama, they recommend that on the first night of Ramadan, so insha'Allah, as soon as we sight the moon, it'll either be Sunday night or Monday night, that Allah, they say, gazes upon the entire creation on this night. He looks and he gives his gaze. His gaze is more than just him seeing. It's a special directed, if you think of energy coming from Allah. They say the one who that gaze touches, they will never experience a type of sadness. They will experience immense spiritual closeness to Allah. We're getting the exact narration right now, but it's a very good night. On that night, we should ask Allah, Allah yalla bi nadirah, give us another, give us a gaze in the lands of the Muslims, in the lands of spirituality. They gather on the first night and they ask Allah to look at them. They ask Allah to assist them. They ask Allah to gaze at them. We should do that. And one of the big scholars in the world today, Sayyidah Habib Omar bin Habib, he said to me, what this will assist us if we want, please forgive us for anything that is part of us and thank you, especially the Arab youth.