 And as I started thinking about the topic that was given to me, or given to us to speak about tonight, which is why me, the question of why me, or why is this happening to me, I started thinking about it and going over a couple of thoughts that came up as I went over this question, because you hear this a lot. It's not just in English, you hear that in other languages as well, and I'm going to share an example of a text from 150 years ago where this exact question is mentioned, why me, why is this happening to me? And as I thought more about it, two stories came up to me, and they both have to do with Hajj. And since we're in the season of Hajj, I want to begin with the story of Hajj, and also end with the story of Hajj, and hopefully have them relate in some way to us furthering our understanding of how to deal with this question of why me when it comes up at our hearts. So the first one is one that I heard from a dear friend and a fellow student of mine in Mauritania. We were both studying at the Mahdara, the Madrasah of Morava, the Hajj in the mountainous region, Tagana, to Mauritania. And Alhamdulillah, in addition to sitting with the Shiyyuf, one of the biggest and best benefits is learning from your peers, because you have discussions, you ask questions, they give pushback, there's arguments, sometimes friendly, sometimes not so friendly, but the end result is that we're learning from each other, we're learning with each other, we're learning from each other, in addition to taking knowledge at the feet of these great scholars that we were blessed to sit with. So this friend of mine said that he had heard of a story of a man who converted to Islam. And after a number of years of being Muslim or I shouldn't say a number of years, I don't know exactly how long he was Muslim. But after a certain amount of time, he was blessed to go to Hajj, and he went through all of the rites of Hajj, and then we know one of the last things that people do on Hajj is the days of Mina, where you're out there stoning. And he went into a tent one day and saw everybody in the tent was lying on their right side, facing the Qibla, with their hand under their cheek. What does that sound like? They're following the sunnah, right, of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, in how he slept. Well, the interesting thing is he took one look at this row of his fellow pilgrims, the other Hajj that were there. He looked at all of them, and they were all sleeping in the same manner. And at that point, he decided to leave Islam. Whatever it was that caught into his heart at that point, there was something, maybe something, we don't know exactly what was his thought process. But for him, that's, he was, one of the things was that, how are all of these people doing all of the same thing and the all of the exact time? Like maybe he was thinking this is a cultish type thing, whereas each of those individuals, they're all individually and sincerely trying to follow the Messenger of Allah, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. We don't know all that was going on in his mind, but we do know that there was an event. He had a belief about that event, and then he had a reaction to that event. That's kind of what I want us to take back from, take out of this time of thinking about how do we respond or react to the question of why me. Now another story, and I'm going to go back to this one as well, go back to both of them. And another story, it's actually the opposite. It's a, it's, it has a happy ending. So there was, and this is a true story. This is not one of those Pila Waqala's urban legends, something that just happens. I heard this from the man that this occurred to in London, in the UK. So he and a friend of his were having a meal, and somebody knocked on the door, and it was just a person, a Londoner, a fellow Londoner who had lost his, he got lost. And this was, of course, the days before GPS when we could easily reroute ourselves. He didn't know where, where to go. So we went on one of the doors and knocked on the door. Now this is in the middle of London. He's a just average British or Londoner. The person opens the door, the two people opening the door were wearing throats and turbans. So that was his first shock. I'm in the middle of London, it's night time. And the pool opens the door as a person wearing a throat and a turban. So that was the first shock. He said, I'm lost. They started talking to him. And then they said, you know what, come on in. It's, it's night, it's cold. Come on, we can, you know, take a break. So he accepted their invitation. He went inside. When he went into the room where they were having the meal, the second shock was that they were on the floor, having their meal together from a single plate sitting on the floor. That was his second shock. And then his third shock was when they started to eat, they ate with their hands. When he saw them eating with their hands, and mind you, they have not told him anything about Islam or about la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah or any of these beautiful, the meanings of the names of Allah any of these are the car of delivering the Dawah, the message of Islam. At that point, he said, I want to be Muslim. So there was something that happened. He had some, some sort of belief about looking at that action. And then he had a behavior that came out of that. And so this is what is called the ABCs. There's an action, there's a belief, and then there's a consequence. And this is what we should be thinking about as that question comes up of why me, what happened? What's my belief about that action? And then what's the consequence? What's the resulting action or something that I said? So he became Muslim, Alhamdulillah, stayed Muslim. The more interesting part of the story is years later, he was in the United Arab Emirates, and he was invited to a meal with a group of people and they were all sitting on a table and there was one person who was being very vocal about why it's so important to eat with forks and why the use of forks could actually supersede the Sunnah of using the three fingers and he started talking about germs underneath the fingernails and all of this downplaying the Sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. After he gave this long speech, he turned to the man who converted in London and said, Brother, could you please share with us how you became Muslim? And he said, Subhanallah, I became Muslim because I saw people eating with their hands. And I thought to myself, after hearing that story, that, you know, Allah Alhamdulillah, but maybe it was that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala gave Hidayah to that person just so that years later, when some person is downplaying the Sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, what might be the seemingly simple Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, that he could come to give victory to that and Nusrah to that saying I became Muslim because of seeing just merely witnessing that Sunnah. So there's an ABCs that happened to him that the consequence was vastly different than what happened to the man on Hajj. So what happened? What's the difference? The difference is in both of those situations, they had something happened that was out of their control. The person on Hajj, he wasn't controlling the way those people were sleeping. The person who got lost, he wasn't controlling that. So what happens to us in life? We can't control that. We cannot control that. But the next two things we can control, we can control our beliefs, our underlying beliefs about what's going on there, and we can control our reaction to those things. So as a simple example, you get stuck in traffic. I think we've all had that situation where we get stuck in traffic, we get late for a meeting, and then we're like, ah, and you start getting frustrated at the stop lights, at the cars, at the trucks who are going slow, we have this frustration. And then if we ask ourselves, well, why are we getting frustrated? Well, because I gotta get to my appointment on time. And so if we did deed, we can start saying, well, what is my belief? What is that belief? What is that aqida, so to speak? Not aqida in the sense of theology. But what is my belief about how the way the world should work? What is my belief about how it should work that's causing me to be frustrated in this moment and then do something or say something or have a reaction? So that's the process of analyzing those ABCs. And when I was introduced to this concept, I thought to myself, well, as Muslims, one of the main things that we do in life is analyze our beliefs. We look and see what is our beliefs? We have a very, alhamdulillah, sophisticated system of understanding Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. I mean, here's the names of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala behind us. We have 99 names that little children memorize and we learned that, we studied them. We study about the angels. We know about the affidah. Like we have very detailed understanding of our theology. But in terms of applying that theology to our life, now, how does that come into our life? How does that iman come into our life? How does it apply? That's what I'm talking about that individual aqida, so to speak, that individual application or understanding of our belief. So when things occur, when things happen to us in life, then we have to look at our reactions, look at how we're reacting to those situations. And then that situation could be a stepping stone up or it could be a slippery slope down into an abyss, just a downward spiral of thoughts that start occurring to the person. Why me? Well, I deserve this. I deserve this and since I deserve this, that person should have given this to me and that I should deserve this. Now what's the solution to that? The solution to that is to remember that as believers, we not only believe in the unseen, right? When we look at the arkan al-iman, think about the hadith of Jibril al-Alihissalam. It's a very seemingly simple hadith, but it gives us a foundation of understanding our deen. When Jibril al-Alihissalam asked the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam about iman, he mentioned six things, belief in Allah, belief in the angels, the messengers, the books, and those are things we don't see or what we have with Quran with us. But the other things, the other elements are elements of the ghaib. And then what's the last one? The qadr, the qadr, we believe in the qadr. The interesting thing about the qadr is that this is almost where the belief joins the action. So if you look at the iman, the point of iman and the arkan of Islam, where the two of them join is in the shahada. They're mentioned in both things. You believe in Allah and the messengers. And then one of the pillars of Islam is the shahada. So that's the action, the statement that comes out of that belief. That's where the iman and the Islam join. And then another place where the iman and the Islam join in terms of being able to turn it into an action is adab of Allah. So we don't just believe that Allah is in control of everything. We act like Allah is in control of everything. So you might come to a person who's experiencing something, or you yourself, and we say to ourselves, why me? Why is this happening? Brother or sister or to yourself, don't you know this is from Allah? I know this is from Allah. I know that. Theologically, I know this is from Allah. I have complete faith in that. I'm just struggling in having my actions represent my aqidah, represent my belief. And so this is where the process of, it's not a belief and qadr issue. It's an action. And so depending on how much we have that belief in the adab and that action and that acceptance of the adab, that will tell us, that will show us how much or that will tell us what it will show us what our reaction will be. So for example, I've seen some of the most beautiful smiles and some of the heartiest of laughter come from people who are the poorest, literally living in tents with dirt floors. Where is that coming from? Whereas you find people living in luxurious homes with luxurious cars and they find it difficult to smile or laugh or if they do, it's not a sincere laughter. So what's the difference? Both of those situations, the people have actions that are coming, things that are happening to them that are outside of their control, whatever it might be. The difference is their belief in it, their acceptance. One person accepting the adab and showing that I'm accepting of that adab. Another person not having that same thing. And this also reminds us of another idea of whether something is a ni'ama or a niqma. They're very similar in the words, the ni'ama and the niqma. The ni'ama is a blessing, but it's a blessing that leads you to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. The niqma is something that looks like a blessing, but it's actually taking you away from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So that person on Hajj, he had the quote-unquote blessing of going to Hajj, but for him in that situation, he turned it in, well, I shouldn't say it wasn't actually a niqma, but he turned that in to a, he made it for himself a sort of a niqma. So how do we develop a resilience to the things that we face in life? So that when that question happens, maybe we won't say it, why me? But we might be thinking, why is this happening to me? One of the things that I wanted to share, and it came to my mind as I was thinking about this topic, is something I learned from a book called Matarat al-Buru, The Purifier of the Hearts. And it's a book written about 150 years ago by a sheikh by the name of Sheikh Ahmed Mouloun, Rahimullah, who looked at the learning system in Mauritania and he saw that there were gaps. And so he started writing books to fulfill those gaps. So they had extensive learning systems, but he said, mm, there's a few things missing. Well, one of the things that he noticed was that there was a lot of focus on certain areas of the al-alum, but people were forgetting about the tradition of purifying the heart. Things that we find in the Qur'an, in the sunnah of the Messenger of Allah, and so he wrote this book. So it has the signs, the symptoms, the cures of over 32 diseases of the heart. And each one of those diseases of the heart has an ayah or hadith to show us where is it coming from. When he gets to, and then he borders it alphabetically, when he gets to the section of adab, of acceptance of adab, he says wassakhatul qadari, the disease of this resentment or this negative reaction to the adab, the type of reaction that would cause a person to say, why me, why is this happening to me? It's called sakhatul qadar by some as a technical terminology. Sakhat meaning anger. You're angry with the qadar of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So it's not that a person does not believe that it's from the qadar of Allah, but it's just that they're not acting as if they believe, it's they're having sakhatul qadar. So he says wassakhatul qadari, an yaatari ba'a alayhi jalla wa ala fima qadaa, ka qawrihi ma'a kuntu astahittu daa, wa ayyu zinbin jarra liha bil adaa. He said sakhatul qadar, the definition, is for a person to go against or have irtirah of what Allah has ordained in a situation. What's a better word for irtirah, like, what's that? Like a rejection or what's that? Another one that comes to mind. It's like just rejecting it, like having a, going against it, arguing with it, debating with it, with that qadar. And as an example, he gives two examples of what a person could say. He says ma'a kuntu astahittu daa, I don't deserve this. Now he's writing this in Mauritania 150 years ago. How many people in this room have heard somebody now in America in English say, I don't deserve this. Raise your hand if you've ever heard somebody say that. I don't deserve this. The next thing he says is, wa ayyu zinbin jarra liha bil adaa. What sin did I do to deserve this? Or what did I do to deserve this? How many people have heard people say that? What did I do to deserve this? And so those are two statements and anything similar to that that if a person is saying them, it's essentially they're showing this non-acceptance of the qadar. And I'll end with, or finish up with the statement of Ahmed Ibn Hanbal. And he says, he says, very interesting. He says, ad-ma'a asab'oona ratul ilmanit tabi'in wa imnat al-uslamin wa imnat al-salaf. Seventy men from the tabi'in and the imams of the Muslims and the imams of the salaf wa fuqa ha'il al-amsar and the jurists of all the major cities a'ala anna sunnatil lati tawafaa aalayha rasulullahi sallallahu alayhi sallam. The sunnah, like when we talk about the sunnah, like somebody says, what's the sunnah? You know, sometimes people think and I'm in no way am downgrading from a person using a miswalk or doing some of the other outward sunnahs, but sometimes we reduce the sunnahs to some specific rituals. He's saying the sunnah that the Prophet died upon, sallallahu alayhi sallam, awwaluha, the first element of the sunnah, every b'a b'a b'a illa, being pleased with the b'a l'a of Allah, being pleased with the ordainment, with the qadr of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, wa ttaslimu li amr illa and submitting to the order of Allah, wa sabr wa tahta haqbihi and having patience at that time. Wa al-afadu bi ma'a amr allahu bi'i and then also taking what Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala has ordered. So how do we get this? How do we get to have this taslimu li ribad illa? This is, that's a huge topic. We can't even scratch the surface and we're all still working on it. But a lot of it has to do with studying, having good tarbiyyah, having good companionship. It doesn't always mean, you know, to develop this taslimu al-amr illa that we have to go back to the scholars. Sometimes there might be issues when a person has a, like now, a lot of people have pathways to doubt where they hear something about the sunnah like the man looking at the people sleeping. It's clearly from the sunnah. We're not gonna say, brother, that's wrong of them to do. We're gonna say, it's wrong for you to have that negative view of what they're doing. Or if somebody reads something about that, the age of A'isharullahullah or some of the rules that are in the Quran, they read something. We're not going to compromise what's in our deen. But what we're going to help that person understand is how do you accept that ordainment of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. And that doesn't always necessarily come from a scholar. We go to the scholars to clarify what our deen is, but it could be a friend, a spouse, your children, community members. And that's why it's important to come to gatherings where we see each other. And it's important to have somebody to confide in. So I'll end there and I'll thank you again. I know I was gonna say there's another story about Hajj, but I don't have enough time to share that one. In short, if you wanna look it up, look up Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak and his story on Hajj and how he made Hajj without going to Hajj. Jazakumullah wa s-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa s-salam.