 I wanted to talk to you about a woman, actually, that I am trying my best to model my life after, to be honest. When I read her story some years back, I just, I don't, you know, when you have that, you know, when you read something or you hear something about just like one particular person and you're just like, I just want to be her, right? Like, I just, even if I, even if I recognize that I can't be all of that, right? I just like give y'all, just give me a piece of it. And this is the great Nana Asma'u. So Nana Asma'u is the daughter of Shehua Uthman Danfolio, who was a great, a very great scholar, basically in the late 1700s. And long story short, he was not only, you know, he wasn't only a scholar, subhanallah, when the West talked about him, they say he was just, he was the, he was like a fighter, that he was a strong fighter. But in reality, it was what is that he's, that he was the, the caliph basically of a very large Islamic empire that had been an Islamic empire, actually, at that point for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so we don't actually talk about Islamic empires inside of Africa. That's just a whole nother, you know, we just got to work on that. That's a whole nother thing. But what happened was, is that at that particular time, the, the base of the Sankhat Empire, or the Caliphate, sorry, was actually closer to West Africa. But the encroachment of slavery, literally the, because slavery was introduced, of course, it was coming down through North Africa into West Africa, through the coast, entire, basically entire villages, if you can imagine, like entire towns, we think about villages, we think small. But in reality, some villages are very big. They're biggest cities that we know them today would be completely disappeared, right? Would be completely disappeared. So if we were to look at, let's say, in one year, over the course of slavery, there's more, it's, it's recorded somewhere, somewhere into the tens of millions, right? Tens of millions of people came up missing. And one particular year, basically, let's say out of Gambia, about two million people came up missing. Now the entire population of Gambia is only 2.5 million people, right? So when we talk about the encroachment of slavery, what we're saying is, there are people who are stealing folks, kidnapping people in, in mass amounts and, and bringing them to the States. So at this point, there was also, I want you to, to understand what's happening. I want to give you a little bit of that historical context, because as a result, it's something that the Islamic Caliphate said, we actually have to move the capital of the Caliphate because of the level of, of harm and war that we're fighting on an ongoing basis. Sometimes we think of slavery, we think, oh, they disobeyed people, that was it. We don't know that there were actually people who were fighting on the forefront to do their best to kind of push back against it. And so they moved the Caliphate, and then there was also an internal conflict, to be honest, between, between the Muslims. And part of the internal conflict and just, you know, we have to tell that, is it okay if we tell ourselves the truth of our history? Is that okay? Okay, because that, you know, it's not usually my way to sugarcoat things. But so I want you to understand that the Muslims in West Africa are in a war against basically the Europeans from the Portuguese to the British that basically because of the encroachment of slavery. And then there's a war that's happening. We'll just say with some of the Northern tribes, not all, but some of the North African tribes against some of the West African tribes because they were some of, we'll just say there were groups of folks that were, that were saying, well, you know, we were warring with you guys, it's okay to say, to sell you into slavery for a number of reasons. The details of that, we can talk about later if you, if you want. But the point is, is that he moved the caliphate and there is a war on two fronts, right? Like we're trying to solve an internal conflict, right? While at the same time, we have a very large enemy from the outside. And the daughter of the, basically of the caliphate, once shehua with mandem who was growing up and when she began, she was in her young twenties. Basically, she herself was also a half of the Quran. She was considered someone who was a master of Maliki Fiqh. She was also a poet, but she decided basically the way that these men are behaving and fighting amongst themselves. I've got no time for it. She literally started a woman's movement of her own. And this movement basically is, she decided, you know what, because inside of that, so you've got this political war going on, inside of that, the Muslim community of some, not all, are debating whether or not women, because of, because of what's happening, should women go out, maybe we should shut down the girls' schools because at that time there were very large institutions where women, when girls were memorizing Quran and learning Maliki Fiqh, there was like a, a push. It always happens during conflict, political conflict. It becomes a question, maybe we, in order to protect our women, we should keep them at home, right? That we shouldn't let them go out to the institution out of fear. Nana Asma'u, may Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala continue to just elevate her rank and expand her, decided I'm not having that. So basically she began with a group of women in her area and she said, what is that feedback? Right? That far? So basically she started with a small group of women and she brought these women together and she was like, listen, this is what we gotta do. There are number one, we have to make sure that women, no matter where they are, understand their Dean, that they understand their personal relationship with Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, that they don't become disconnected from the Quran and their spiritual tradition. We have to make sure that these women know their Fiqh because this is also, we're in spiritual warfare. This is not just a political issue, we're in a matter of spiritual warfare. We have to make sure that these women, that their prayers are accepted. On top of that, SubhanAllah, she said that what happens in the midst of war is that SubhanAllah, the people that are most affected are women and children. So she said, we have to make sure that these women also have their own means of economic empowerment and they have to know how to do it in a halal manner. They have to know how do they start their own businesses and have their own businesses and they're going to do it according to Fiqh, not according to, we just gotta do what we gotta do, but they were going to know how to do it so that those women would have a tofiq inside of their affairs. She also said, we know that SubhanAllah, she said, in some of these areas that people don't have, you know, people don't actually have access to water. We have to make sure that people always have access to water, that we want to make, we have to still take care of our people because when the caliphate moves, right, then basically it's like the capitol is going, her fear was like, now the capitol is going to be that place where people, you know, the elite can also move, but everybody can't move. Everyone can't afford to move. Who's got a tissue for me? I don't have a tissue. Somebody have a tissue? Does that get okay? We know what's happening. Thank you. So she understood that everybody can't move, but also she understood that because of the encroachment of slavery, I want us to think about it for a minute. If you go into a region and you steal the most, you steal, basically let's say those that could be the labor and the ones who were going to be able to do the work. And we're not just talking about the farmers, right? We're also talking about the muscle. We're also talking about the stealing of the army. We're also talking about the stealing of the teachers. We're talking about the stealing of the builders, of the craftsmen. We're talking about those who do construction. We're talking about the doctors. We're talking about the Quran teacher. We're talking about, we're not, sometimes we think it's just one class. If we say we're going to steal, right, majority of this place, who's going to be left? The weak, the vulnerable. And so what she says is, you know, what happens in these situations is sometimes they won't have, they won't have proper access to food. We've got to make sure that these populations are still taking care of. And lastly, she said, of course, in these situations is that if, you know, if women are having babies, if people are getting sick because of not having clean water, they've got to have access to healthcare. So basically she started with a small group of women. And to make a long story short, every time she would go into a village and she would make sure that the, that village would have those five things. She would always come and teach sacred knowledge, making sure that they knew their Dean properly. They knew they studied Akida. They would study Maliki Fiqh. She would make sure then that they had some kind of economic arm by which those women would be able to sustain themselves. She would, so then she would also build a school and she would build a clinic. And she didn't train a group of women who were in that village that she would train them to the point that now I can hand over this project to you. So you don't, if they tell you, you can't come into the masjid, you don't have to worry about it because your job is to make sure that these women, the women in this particular area, know their Dean fully intact and that they are not dependent upon anyone economically because they know how to sustain themselves, that they have established their own businesses. When it comes to, she looked at, okay, who are the midwives and the conveyors one, right? And we can train one of you to be the midwife. Then your job is to train somebody else and to get an apprentice. So then we're taking care of our own healthcare. She did that in over 800 villages. I know, raise your hand if you're like, can I just have a piece of just a little bit, just a teeny bit, right? So I'm like, wait a minute, first you didn't just train and in every, in every village she went to, she made sure she left a group of women who were basically who were at a scholarly level that they could then train the other women, that they then became responsible to date. We still have the, we still have that definitely throughout Senegal, definitely throughout places in Nigeria and Gambia and Mauritania, you have places where women have their own centers, their own Quran memorization centers. They study Maliki Fiqh, they have their own, what they like, they call it, even they call it a susu in terms of the way they support each other. I tell us this to say that a lot of times as women, I give you this story to, it's exactly what we're talking about when we talk about having a level of faith, right? And resilience and knowing what is, you don't actually need to know it all and you don't actually need the support of every man in the Masjid. I know, please, maybe, you know, so I'll close the doors because I don't want nobody to get mad. But in our, you know, sometimes we're so focused on, well, the men won't let me or, you know, the men are holding us back or the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Whatever it is as opposed to let them run their affairs and let us run ours, right? That they are not basically look for the path of least resistance. I'm not concerned somehow along you as women, you're raising men, you're raising them. So if you want something different, then you make something different, right? You want a different reality for the next generation? You're the one responsible for that. Trust me. Trust me.