 We begin with the praises of Allah, the Lord of the worlds. We praise Him, and we seek His aid, and we seek His forgiveness, and we seek His protection. Whomever Allah guides, none can misguide. And whomever He misguides, none can guide. And we bear witness that He is Allah, that He has no like, and that Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, the man of praise, is a slave and his final messenger. Praise be to Allah as well for bringing us together on this day of gathering, on this day of Jumu'ah. As we know, this day of gathering is a reminder of that first primordial gathering on the day of the Covenant. On that day, Allah asked us, Allah is your Lord. And we all witnessed Allah's Lordship, and we testified based upon that saying, Bala indeed you are. And so this gathering is a reminder. But this reminder is also a warning, a warning of that upcoming gathering on the day of judgment, when we will be asked whether we were truthful and faithful to that primordial Covenant. In this life then that we have between these two days, the day of the Covenant and the day of judgment, there are times that Allah gives us moments of opportunity. There are times in this life that we catch glimpses of paradise in the dunya. There are periods when the dunya seems to fade into the background, and the nearness of Allah comes into the foreground. And Ramadan is one of these moments. This is something that I believe most people recognize intuitively. We can see in ourselves the expansion in our capacity to stand for Tahrari and for Tahajjud, the expansion in our capacity to read Quran, each juz passes one after another. And these blessings are such, so concentrated, that it is said that the Salaf, the early generations, they would make dua to reach Ramadan for six months before reaching Ramadan. And they would make dua for the six months after Ramadan that all of their worship in Ramadan was to be accepted. And so Ramadan is a time of expansion as we know. And yet what is sometimes overlooked or underappreciated about Ramadan is that this expansion is accompanied by something else. That something else is a restriction, a fast. As-Salam in Arabic or Som literally means al-Qaf is to restrain yourself. And so think about this dichotomy, that Allah places expansion in matters of the afterlife, expansion in matters of the material, exactly where He places restriction in matters of this world. An increase in the spiritual and in the metaphysical can only come when there's a decrease, when there's a diminishment in the material and the physical. And so we should pay attention to this wisdom for it has far-reaching practical implications for our fasts. We know based on the famous hadith that the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, says Many are those who fast yet gain nothing from their fast except hunger and thirst. Now, why would this be the case? What are we actually commanded to do when we're commanded to fast? Is it just to delay our meal times until after madrub? What a fast is? Is it fast just to not eat so that we become hungry in the same way that if we skip breakfast or lunch, we become hungry? No, this is not. But the fast is meant to be. The purpose of the fast, as the Mufassirin explained, is to weaken your physical appetite, to weaken your physical capacities. That is to diminish your attachment and your need of this material world. It is to wean the lower self, the ego, off of its halal appetites, so that the soul, so that the Ruh can ascend, so that it's not stuck and bound to this material world, and so it can be free to engage with Allah, with the Sublime and the Majestic. That is rather than the soul being occupied in managing the affairs of this world. And in accordance with this wisdom, with this dichotomy between the material and the spiritual, that the masters of the heart outline four conditions for the acceptance of the fast. And what they mean by the acceptance of the fast is not so you can gain a certain number of rewards. But what they mean by making the fast acceptable is for the fast to achieve its intended purpose. And so the first of these conditions and all of them, all of these conditions are restrictions. The first of these restrictions or conditions is to lower the gaze from the unlawful. The Prophet, peace be upon him, says that just a single gaze upon what is unlawful that is, just a single gaze is a poisoned arrow from the bow of shaitan, la'nahullah. And so whoever foregoes it and does so out of fear of Allah, Allah will grant him a faith in which he will taste the sweetness in his heart. And these days this gazing upon the unlawful has a special applicability to screens, to social media. Because if we think about it, how often do we see ourselves scrolling past something or watching a video? And what the video is depicting or what we're scrolling past is just a description of gluttony or of lust or something else. And we know that just seeing these things can excite our passions, can excite these desires in us. And yet these are the very appetizing fastings meant to diminish. These are the very things that fasting is meant to accustom us to not needing. And yet screens are designed to get us hooked, to get us addicted to wanting more and more. And so this then is the first restriction upon us to restrict the eyes. The second condition that the scholars mentioned is to restrict the tongue. That is from endlessly talking, from lying, from gossip, from arguing. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said, is related to have said, fasting is but a shield. If one of you fasts, be not foul or hot-headed. If a person fights him or insults him, let him say, I'm fasting, I'm fasting. In another hadith it says, whoever does not leave false testimony and acting in accordance with false testimony, Allah has no need for him to leave his food and his drink. This is the weight, this is the heaviness with which the sins of the tongue are weighed. And so what fasting demands, as we see in these hadith, is silence. Fasting demands that we stop speaking so much because of how easy it is to fall into the sins of the tongue. And even the physical fast, the fast from food, helps in this regard because you can't really carry a conversation if you don't have the energy from your lack of food to carry that conversation. But what this lack of conversation, what the silence then does free the tongue to do, gives the tongue time to do, is to recite the Qur'an, to be in dhikr, and this is the purpose for which the tongue was created in the first place. And so this is the fasting of the tongue, this is the second of the four conditions. The third condition is to restrict the ear, to restrict the ear from listening to anything that the tongue is forbidden to say. We know that one of the prohibitions of the ear is to remain silent in the presence of backbiting. That is, if someone is backbiting in front of us, then for us just to sit there and listen to it. Either we must leave the room or we must say something against the backbiting. Allah says in the Qur'an, Sit not with them, meaning don't sit with the backbiter until they delve into another conversation. You would then be like them, meaning that had you stayed, you would have been like them in sin. Additionally, listen to how the hypocrites, those who don't believe but just pretend to believe, listen to how Allah describes them. They are always listening to lies, they are always devouring the unlawful. And we know that just as the tongue is meant to recite Qur'an, the ear is meant to listen to Qur'an. But if the ear is clawed with listening to all these unlawful things, if the ear is clawed up by listening to gossip and argumentation and listening to music, because a lot of music very often contains, again, these descriptions and depictions of the unlawful, how will there be any room remaining to listen to the Qur'an with your heart? Or will you just listen to the Qur'an as sounds? And so this then is the third restriction to restrict the ears. And the fourth restriction then as mentioned is to restrict the stomach. Not only during the fast, obviously, but when breaking the fast as well. In short, we are commanded not to feast during iftar and sohoor, to not indulge ourselves excessively during iftar and sohoor. The hadith we listened to at the beginning, Many are those who fast yet gain nothing from it, except hunger and thirst. And just think about this. Think about how foolish it would be if at the end of a month of working in the office, a month of hard work and difficulty, as you're leaving the office, you get your paycheck and you throw your paycheck in the dumpster. Think about how worthless all that work would have been, how useless all that time spent was. And think about then how this month should go, how this month of work should be spent, whether it should just be thrown into garbage as soon as you, as soon as Eid comes or as soon as your iftar comes. We know that the stomach is an inroad to evil as it comes in the hadith, just as the ear and the tongue and the eyes can be inroads to evil. And so the Prophet, peace be upon him, says, and he says this about eating excessive halal food. He says, There is no vessel worse than the stomach that the child of Adam fills. And so we're commanded to restrict the stomach to the point that we don't feel, that we feel more hunger and more thirst than we would normally feel because this is the medicine that is prescribed for man to gain our spiritual strength. We should not enter our iftars gorging on a 10 course meal, eating all kinds of food, seeking special foods for Ramadan just because we feel hungry. We are meant to feel hungry and that is the purpose of the fast. I say this to you, and I ask Allah's forgiveness and to you, the followers of the Muslims, forgive him. He is the Most Merciful.