 Zizak al-Akhirim for coming on this blessed Friday night. Zizak al-Akhirim to MCC for hosting this event, and for our beloved sister, Haba, and sister, Hossai, or sister, Hossai, for being here. Inshallah, we're waiting for Siddiz Isshant, who's gonna join us. I think the topic was changed from the parent teens to, that was postponed to a few weeks from now. Tonight was more along the line of the prophetic household. One of the things, especially people who are in counseling, that a lot of the parents, they complain, is they talk about their children because they don't know how to deal with them. And one of the things that the children complain, they talk about their parents because they don't know how to deal with them. So it's this dilemma where we have a breakdown of communication. Now, in Islam, the family doesn't start when you have kids. As a matter of fact, the family starts when you're looking for a spouse. One of the reasons when you look at a woman as a man to get married, you're like, is she gonna be a good mother? That's one of the main reason. Is she gonna be a good mother for my children? And that is essential within the Islamic tradition and has been when somebody wanted to marry, if a woman wants to marry a man that would say, would he be not just a good husband, but a good father? If the relationship starts like that, it's a good start and it will have a good end. And whenever you have a good beginning and you have a good end, the middle is always good. When we look at the Prophet, peace be upon him, and the Quranic principle of a household, of life, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala in Surat Al-Rome, the European chapter of the Romans, which really are what we call the European now. This is a beautiful verse, all of the verses are beautiful, but there's an interesting thing in this verse. Amongst the signs of God is that he has created mates for you, male, woman for man and man for woman. Right? Now there's a word here used, so dwelling tranquility. And tranquility is not earthly. Tranquility is not earthly. It's heavenly. Trials and tribulations is earthly. That's what we give. A dunya darul hammin wa hammin wa tila'in wa fitna, this is one of the great advice of the spiritual master, that this world is a place of fitna, of civil strife, and of trials, and of tribulation, of war, and of deception. This is what the dunya can give you. But what comes from the heaven is tranquility. And this is why most of us, when you go to sleep, you're in a state of tranquility unless you get a nightmare. It's just complete peace and ease. Right? And Imam Al-Haddad, Rahmatullah Ali said, he said the first time a believer experienced real tranquility is in the grave. It's just complete peace without any anxiety and any worries. Where did this tranquility come from? When Allah says, litaskulu ilayha, right? That go live with this tranquility in sakina. Well, it's a mekan, the place for this is called in Arabic, it's called muskan. Muskan is where sakina comes. So everything has a place. So if you have a cup, you have a saucer, you put the cup on it, right? If everything has a place, you have a rack there where the shoes go in there. So that's a rack and you put your shoes there. So where the sakina comes to, it comes only in a place called muskan. That's ism mekan for it. The place sakina comes down to. And muskan is your home. That's, if you have a functional home, if we build that house that is functional, then you experience that sakina, that tranquility in your house. But if that house, there's no sakina because it is not prepared for this sakina to come down. Because you come to the masjid, you have your shoes in your hand and there's no shoe rack. You don't know where to put it. So sakina comes down and looking for this muskan that is pure so it can come down. So if it sees it, it will come down to that house. And that's the house what we call the abode of happiness. That's what happiness comes down when there's sakina in that household. Then Allah says, wajal ebeinakum mabadatan wa rahma. Allah says, in this household, if you build a functional household and my sakina comes into that house, by the nature of that sakina, love and mercy will enter your hearts, the husband and wife. And from that love and mercy, that it comes from Allah and a house that is built with sakina, those are you get children that are what? That are beautiful. And that's why when Imam Ali asked the Prophet I wanna name my son, his firstborn son from Bibi Fatima. And he said, what do you wanna name him? And he wanted to name him Water, Harb. Arabs, they had tough names like Hamza, Lion, you know. He said War because he wanted to be a warrior. The art of shiverly unfortunately is lost now. But the Prophet said, no, his name is Hassan. So he named Hassan, he named Hussein, and he named Mohsen, the three child. Mohsen died at a young age. So those are the names that the Prophet gave because they came from a household that was filled with tranquility, with love and with mercy. The output of that was completely just beauty and eqsan. And that's why you have Hassan and Hussein, the two Shabaab Ahlul Jannah. These are the two superstars of paradise. Just like in the dunya you have superstar and paradise you have superstar too. But the superstars of paradise are Hassan and Hussein. Why? Because they came from these two people that built a functional household. And then the love that came from Allah in mercy that came from Allah entered their hearts. And that's the functional household. Now, how do we know if our house is dysfunctional? You know, Ahmad Saqr, Rahimullah, he's a beautiful man down south in LA. And he did a lot of Dawa work in the 80s. I remember having pretty much all his books and he would release a book every three months, but it was just things that we needed at that time. A beautiful man. And one of the things that he did, he wrote a poem. I don't know if you guys remember, we were in college. What if the Prophet SAW visited your house? And when I read that poem, I used to live by myself and I was in Hayward. When I read that poem, oh, did I do a house cleaning? And he was real, he said, so what if the Prophet SAW walks into your house? What would you hide? What did you want him to see? Would there be magazine? Then you would be like, oh my God, please, please Prophet, don't look at those magazines. Would there be things in there? Would there be frames in your room? That was, what is, who's that man on, who's that girl? Like why you have these idols on your walls? So it was, what I appreciated from that poem was it was real. It actually talked to me as a young man. And I did a house cleaning. And I think that that's where a lot of the people, when we're struggling with these things, we don't know the source is the house. That's where the source is. That, you have to now take it back to the original source. So that's the source of the Juliet. But the original home is the heart of the human being. And that's where everything starts. We have to change our hearts. We have to purify our hearts. We have to wash our hearts. In knees, kullu shayin yasda. Everything rusts, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said. And they said, everything? What about the heart? He said, even the heart of the human being rust, like the iron that rust. And one of the great scholars said, yahayu yaqayum is one of the beautiful zikr that removes the rust from the heart of the human being. To do zikr, you remove those rust. This, this, a lot of people in this country, they said, what are you in pursuit of? The pursuit of happiness. This is, everybody wants to achieve happiness. This is Aristotle's, the, you know, he and his Nicomachian ethics. We are all in pursuit of happiness. Everybody wants to be happy. The reason why we work so hard, that we want to get educated, we get married, all that. If you ask at the end, what do you want to do in your life? I just want to be happy. We want money because we want to be happy. We want family because we want to be happy. We want friends. Everything is in pursuit of happiness. But Maulana Jalla did in the room, he said something really amazing. He said, it's not that hard to pursue happiness and become happy. He said, what is hard is for you to become happiness, that you are happiness. Wherever you go, any house you enter, that house you turn it into a house of happiness. And this is why, because there was so many people around him, they would go ask for counsel. He said, we're so depressed, Maulana, how is it that you're so happy? How is it that you're always so happy? He said, I'm happy because I turned my heart into an abode of happiness. And I stayed away from everything that is depressing in the world. I don't deal with things that are better. I don't deal with depression and sadness because I am happiness. And that is contagious. That whatever you go, if we walk into a funeral, automatically you start crying. Sometimes you cry, you don't even know who died. People go in with their friends. I don't even know the person. I just came with a friend. And then you shed tears because everyone is weeping because it's contagious. Depression is contagious. Dalilo tahlitika sohbat al-mukhallitim. Wa dalilo wahshatika onsuka bil-mustawhishin. This is Ibn Atallah's secondary. Because I asked him, so why do people feel depressed? Why do people feel lonely? He said, the reason why you're depressed because you're hanging out with depressed people. And that's the nature of this world. If you hang around with people who make money, you learn how to make money. You'll be good at it. If you hang around the mechanics, you will learn how to fix cars. If you hang around, the person they have a proverb, they said, bomone shini moshevi bodhigni shini siyoshavi. If you said what else, you become one of us, right? But if you sit like with the people, there used to be these people who used to get the pots because they used to cook on fire and they used to get all black underneath the pots. And they used to come, these people used to clean it and make it bright again. He said, if you sit with the people who clean those pots, you're gonna have some stain on your clothes. It's gonna get it dirty. And that's the nature of the companionship. Who are your companions? So the household, the human heart, and then the companionship that you keep, those are the three elements that you can be on a prophetic path or people can be on a path of shaitan or on a path of, you know, the professor said a person is on the religion of his friends. And if you think that your friends don't have a factor on you that they're not gonna influence you, you're just fooling yourself. You're not fooling anybody, you're just fooling yourself. I'm telling you. Because this is the nature of friends that they will influence their friends. And I did give a khutbah here on friendship a few months ago, but yad abad battarbu ad-dasmur abad. One of the best advice ever given about friendship, and it's in Zernuji's ta'alimu mu ta'alim, that a bad friend is worse than a poisonous snake. Because a poisonous snake only hurts your body, but a bad friend hurts your body in your faith. That's the nature of bad friends. So keeping the companionship that are beautiful, that are, you know, this prophetic household that you're trying to build, it requires us to change our hearts, to purify our hearts first and foremost, then to build that house, a household where sakina comes in, tranquility comes in, and it's filled with beauty. And then in our social life, we keep the company of the people who are beautiful, and they can only stack, you know, if you sit with a perfume seller, the least you will go home with is a good scent. Even if you don't buy anything, because this is the nature of perfume seller, you go home, you just smell good. Just like when you go to Shawlimar, you go home, right? The chicken tikka masala smell, right? So that's the nature of friendship and companionship. So, inshallah with that, we'll open it to discussion, and we'll let Sister Hussai take over. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Alhamdulillah wa salatu wa salamu ala ashraf al-anbiya'i wa al-mursaleen. Sayyidina wa maulana wa habibina Muhammad. Sallallahu alaihi wa salam, wa ala alaihi wa sahbihi wa salam tasliman kathira. As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Alhamdulillah. Welcome to that beautiful talk, masha'Allah. You had so many gems. Some of the things that really stood out are the three focuses that you had in terms of really modeling our homes to the prophetic model, or trying our best to model our homes to the prophetic standard. So maintaining or looking at the home and doing the house cleaning, as you said, of the home, the cleaning of the heart, and then the cleaning of our sahbah, our companions. But the point that you made about happiness and becoming happiness, I actually wanted to kind of speak about that for just a moment because even, masha'Allah, Habib and I, when we were speaking earlier, we were talking about perspective, right? The perspective that we have in life really does shape our experience. And insha'Allah, she'll speak more on that point. But one of my favorite hadith, of course, is the hadith khudsi. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la says, And I have been abdibi. And I love this hadith because it's very empowering. What Allah's telling us is, again, what you think of Him, right? And that extends to your circumstance. He will, of course, affirm. So if you have a positive outlook and you accept that whatever you're going through, whether it's a tribulation, whether it's khayr, blessing, whatever it is, that it, because it's from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, that there's meaning behind it, that there's a purpose behind it, and you don't let your perspective turn from Allah, right? Because this is the nature of the dunya. When we don't have the right understanding of why we're in certain circumstances, we then are left to the whisperings of shaytan, the external evil that is outside of us, but also our own nafs, which will start to whine and complain, and you just become very nafsi in your understanding. You're not thinking of the greater wisdom of why you may be going through something. So having that mind shift is really important, and that's why, again, when we look at this idea of how do we establish a prophetic household, another hadith that is really important for all of us to learn and to internalize is the hadith, alla kullukum r'a'in wa kullukum masurun an-ra'iyati. Indeed, all of you are a shepherd, and each of you is responsible for your flock. And this is another empowering hadith, because what is Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la telling us? He's saying that He has given all of us leadership roles, and that includes men, of course, women, as well as children, believe it or not. Yes, even you have leadership roles, you have expectations within your household. And so defining those roles becomes now the next part of how we can bring some balance into our homes, right? Because leadership, of course, requires to know what your role is. So if you know that you're a leader, because Allah has appointed you a leader, He has told us that men are leaders in their households over their families and their responsibilities to maintain their families. And then for women, their leadership role is to maintain their children and their household. And then, of course, for children, it's to help in the household and to take some of those burdens from their parents and to be a part of the household. So immediately you set the tone of what? Two things, respect, right? Respect is so essential in a household, in order for a household to have balance and to have peace, we have to have respect. And if everyone sees one another as a leader and they see that they have an important role to play in the household, then naturally you will bring respect into the conversation, into the way you treat one another. So respect is essential. And the other really important quality is empathy. If we don't have either of these two qualities in our homes, which all of which we learned from the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, you will not find a single example of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam ever, of course, because he had the best of character, of ever speaking to anyone without respect. Even those who wished harm on him, subhanallah, he had, because why, as the saying of Said Naisa, a vessel only pours out what it contains. He was incapable of putting out anything other than respect because he was pure. And so if we understand that, then we look to ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. So you will not find any example of him ever speaking to a child or a person of a different background. It doesn't matter in a way where he put himself above them, never. Even though he was the best of creation, the most beloved of Allah swt. And if anybody could have done that, it should have been him, right? But he didn't do it. Why? Because he knew who he was with Allah and he didn't need to do that. And also he's modeling for us that if you want to have households that are peaceful, you don't need to demand respect. You don't need to raise your voice. You don't need to lead with an iron fist and threaten and use charged language. You don't need to do that. If you are respectful, right, people will listen to you. So really watching the way that we talk to one another. And this is in every direction, from parent to child to spouse to spouse, every direction we need to restore respect in our homes. And we also need to restore empathy. And this is really important, especially as I see so many teens here. You know, earlier today I was with a group of teens and I did an icebreaker with them. I was getting to know them. So I asked them, tell me your name. Tell me what's your favorite day of the week and why. And then tell me what's your happy place. And Subhanallah, the answers really touched my heart. Favorite day of the week, what do you guys guess? Knowing teens, what do you think it's gonna be? All right, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Pretty predictable. Saturday and Sunday. The majority, with the exception of two people who said I think Monday and Wednesday, and three people, Monday, Wednesday and Tuesday for very different reasons. Everyone else said Saturday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. What do you think the reason why they love those days? Yes? There's no school. That was part of it, but there was another really beautiful reason. What is it? They get to stay home. Few reasons were given. One, it's time with family, which is really beautiful to hear. Two, they get to sleep in, okay? Why do I mention this? Because I wasn't surprised. This is something that I have heard repeatedly for years from teenagers who are going through one of the hardest phases of life, that they feel that sleep, which is a human need, it's everybody needs rest, right? Is something that they don't get enough of, and if they speak up, they're not respected. That is not seen as an important need. And I think it's really, we have to look to ourselves and really understand when a child, who again is growing, they're developing, their brains are developing, just like an infant. You wouldn't wake up an infant from sleep. You know that an infant or a toddler, they need their sleep, you let them have their naps. When they wake up, they wake up. But how many of us in our households don't have the basic empathy to respect this very basic human need, and basic in the sense of, if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this is on the bottom tier, right? We need food, we need water, we need air, we need rest, we need sleep. So if a child is coming to their parent and saying, I don't want to go to so and so, I don't want to do this because I'm really tired, can I please sleep? And the parent is, no, you have to go, get up right now. And then knocking on the door and waking them up and being irritated, why? Because I have a schedule, I have something that I need to get done, get up and do it right now, right this minute. What do you think is going to, it's a breakdown immediately of respect and empathy. There's no respect, that child has a need. And I say this because again, I want to advocate for our youth. Sometimes these very basic things, they feel like no one's understanding them. And if you think about, although it seems like, okay, why is that a big deal? But does sleep not affect everything, right? How many of us, when we don't get enough sleep, are not very pleasant to be around, right? So when I hear the parents telling me about their teens who are, have an attitude problem, who are grumpy, who don't want to talk to them, who don't want to sit and have dinner with the family or who just, they can't figure out, I have to point them to these very basic things. Are they resting? Are they getting enough rest? Oh yeah, here and there. And then you start like questioning and you realize if you made these little simple adjustments of fulfilling each other's basic needs, what do you need? Do you, are you okay? Checking in with them, are you resting? Do you need anything? Or anything else? Because there's a lot of things that are going on, you know, on both sides. And this goes both ways, by the way. Parents obviously have needs too. They may be tired and exhausted as well, but they don't think that you can help them. But what would you do with teenagers? I mean, how do you think your parents would respond if you went up to them after they just cooked dinner or came home from a long day's work, your father, when he enters the household? And you empathize, realizing that he was out all day long in a long commute. We live in an area where there's usually long commutes for a lot of our parents. So you have the fatigue of just being out all day and then on top of that, that, and then you have to come home and get dinner ready, help with homework. How do you think your parents would feel if you just went up to them and said, hey, dad, are you okay? Can I get you anything? Or mom, can I help you with anything? Do you need like a shoulder rub? Maybe I can give you a shoulder rub after dinner. How do you think they would feel? Suddenly, they feel seen. Suddenly, they feel appreciated. Suddenly, they feel validated. Those exchanges, as simple as they seem, can do incredible wonders to repair some of the breakdown that we have in our households. Because again, we live in a time where everybody's just doing their own thing. Kids have their homework, they have their sports, they have their routines, their clubs, parents are at work, they have to go shop, they have this and that to do, and nobody's really seeing each other. Nobody's really stopping and appreciating one another and then offering these two things that we are taught in our Dean from the very beginning. If you're looking at any part of our faith, you will find these themes of how we speak to one another should always be with love, muwadah, with respect, with empathy, with compassion. You will find it throughout the Qur'an, throughout the hadith, but if we don't have that in our own households, then are we surprised when we find a breakdown in communication? Should we be surprised? Of course not. So really essential that we first and foremost understand our roles, that each of us have leadership qualities, all of us, and that should command respect from others as well as that we give back respect to everyone in the household and then that we also empathize, inshallah. There's a lot more to say, but I would like to now invite Sister Heba because mashallah, I'd love to hear from you about the point that we were speaking about earlier in terms of how can we change our perspective, right? How can we have this shift in understanding? Bismillah. Peace be upon you. Peace be upon you, too. Peace be upon you, too. I'm from the family of Khawani. Sorry, I'll just take a call like that. Thank you very much, Sidi Faridun and Hossai for your very pertinent points. I'd like to add another layer onto the incredible points that were mentioned and this comes from a place of many conversations that I've had with teenagers and adolescents and young adults over the past, I would say, seven years. One thing that I would say that having a tranquil and serene home comes down to is having emotionally regulated parents. And this is a very large area that, you know, parents from the previous generation didn't have the luxury of really investing in. And this is a conversation that I have with many adolescents, is providing the perspective of the parent who is coming to the United States from another country, not speaking the language of this country. And there are many unknowns of being in this country. And of course, naturally, all of this change comes with a lot of stress, right, and a lot of anxiety and a lot of turbulence, I guess you could say. And so navigating all of these changes and trying to make a home for the family, right, the mother and the father coming together and trying to make a home for the family, while also trying to maintain balance and stability within their marriage, which is a whole other thing, right, on its own. And then trying to parent children in a country that you're not very familiar with and that you're not necessarily aligned with the values within the culture of this country, in some sense. And when I speak about values, I'm really speaking about moral standards, right, morality. Dr. Russell Barclay is a well-known, he's a renowned researcher on ADHD. And there are many theories about ADHD that I'm not even gonna get into because there are way too many factors to consider. But he states that a really big problem with parenting and raising children in order to have a tranquil home that starts with being a couple and then it transcends into a home that has children, perhaps, but not every couple will have children. That's another thing to consider, is he talks about this concept of parents being shepherds and not engineers. And where we go wrong as parents is when we try to play the role of engineers and we don't realize that we are just shepherds. And this is very critical to understand because all that we can do as parents is provide the pasture within which our children will graze, essentially. We get to decide how we live our lives. We get to decide where we go, who to let into our homes, which is a sacred space. We get to decide how we talk to one another and how we engage with each other. We get to decide how we regulate ourselves as parents because emotions are at times we call, for children we call them big feelings. But guess what? Adults also have big feelings and adults also have tantrums. And sometimes those tantrums are very ugly. If the parent never learned through modeling from their own parents how to regulate their own selves and how to remain calm and how to remain composed and how to not take out my frustrations, my stress, my worries, the things that I'm concerned about on my children because someone within that family has to be the adult. But what happens is a lot of the adolescents that you'll meet have become parentified children. They are the ones who feel like they are running the household because the parent is not acting like an adult in the sense of emotional regulation. They don't know how to fully regulate their nervous system because there's the mind and then there's the nervous system. And if there's been a lot of pain that an adult has gone through, that is as a result of Ibtila Edd, as a result of like Siddhi Feridun was saying, trials and hardships and difficulties. But you never really processed those events that have happened to you. You don't really know how to make sense of them. You don't know why, you know, Allah has decreed this for you, right? And you may never know, that's not our job to understand or negotiate, right? The terms of our existence. We didn't create ourselves. But people need to make meaning out of what happens to them. Narrative development is a huge aspect of what I do, helping people come to terms with the pain that they have experienced. And a lot of the time, it's pain that they have experienced at home, not from strangers outside of their family. It's pain that they have experienced as a result of not being seen. Like Siddhi Feridun was saying, not being heard, their needs are not being met. Because also, I think the parents love their children. However, they don't know how to express that love in a way that is perhaps healthy. Because they never learned how to honor their own needs. So here is the parent, you know, stressed out, under a lot of pressure, you know, having to meet a lot of demands. And on top of that, I have to maintain a relationship with my spouse. And then on top of that, I have to take care of these children and make sure they're fed, taking care of, nurtured. Everything else is, you know, provided for them. And some things got to give because that is a lot of pressure. And here in the U.S., we don't necessarily always have a village, right? Unless you create a village for yourself and your family. And Dr. Leonard Sacks talks about this in his books. And I really encourage every parent to read his books because he has, his values are very aligned with our values. And he talks about that you create a bubble, literally a bubble for you and your family in which you raise your children, if you have children, you raise your children together because we have similar values. And if my child goes out of line, my child may not necessarily want to listen to me as a parent, but maybe my friend, who's a family friend, can step in and have a relationship with the child and advise the child lovingly. However, there has to be a receptivity, right? For the advice. So having this conception in our minds of how to be parents and what it means to be parents, just like every prophet was a shepherd first, before prophecy. Because a lot of things happen when you're a shepherd. Your flock isn't necessarily going to want to listen and abide by your instructions. However, you have to learn how to be gentle. You have to learn patience. And when we talk about sabir, we think that sabir means just patience, but actually it's a compounded word that means a lot of different things. It means endurance, it means perseverance, it means steadfastness, right? Amongst several other things. And when you bring all of those together, patience is just one portion of what sabir means. But you learn sabir. And essentially what you're actually learning is how to regulate yourself when things don't go my way. Because they are individuals of their own. I can't control them. My job is not to control them whenever there is control or coercion. You're going to find them going in the opposite direction. So a lot of people will say, I don't want to be at home. I would rather actually be somewhere else. And that is the most heartbreaking thing is because we want our children to be at home with us. We want them to listen to our stories, our narratives. We don't want other narratives infiltrating their minds because one of the main things that I research is post-modernism. This is what my dissertation is on. And how it leads towards states of fragility and not resilience. And there are many traces of post-modernism everywhere around us. And post-modernism, if you'd like to have an idea of what it is, Foucault, who was a French theorist, if you want to call him that, one of his statements is that he says, my job is not to be right or wrong. I'm not concerned with being right or wrong. So there's no criterion. But my job is to be interesting. So as human beings, we just need to be interesting. But we are not concerned with being right or wrong. And we're not concerned with authority. So religion, leaders, we're not concerned with them. And what they have to say. So overthrowing, overthrowing the patriarchy, dismantling all of the dominant discourse that exists in our society that serve as anchors, right, that relate to gender, that relate to how you feel about things and how you view the world, it dismantles all of that. So what you're actually doing is I'm removing all of the anchors for our teenagers. And this becomes an extremely dangerous playing field. And then the parents come in and the parents are trying to control. They're not realizing that I just need to be a shepherd and provide the pasture and control the environment. But let them be who they are, honor who they are, who Allah swt has created them to be, instead of constantly trying to change them by projecting my own needs onto the child and wanting them to be something other than what they are, what they're meant to be. Now, there's a research study done by a fellow anteater, UCI anteater that I went to UCI with, Aufmann Obergi, Dr. Aufmann now, and he led a research study for Jaqeen Institute that talked about why adolescents are leaving Islam. And the main thing that he talked about were that there are soft doubts and there are hard doubts. Everyone has soft doubts. At some point in your life, you've doubted things about the faith and you've gotten responses for them. That made sense to you. That infused you with a sense of purpose and meaning. That kept you steadfast. That was your why. You understand your why. You're connected to it. You know why you do what you do. However, with postmodernism and modernity in general, you're not really connected to your why. You actually don't know why you're doing, why you're praying. A lot of people say, I don't really feel anything. Same thing with fasting. They don't understand the purpose behind it. So in addition to understanding this concept that we as parents are shepherds, another thing that we have to understand is that societal, the current of society is based on this notion that it's short-term gain and long-term loss. But what we focus on as a society is short-term gain. So whatever feels good, do it, right? Whatever impulses you feel act upon them. Be who you are. You do you. All of these different messages that are all over social media. And this is exactly what is entering their mind and starting to mess with their thoughts, right? Well, maybe I just need to be who I am. So if I'm having certain feelings, I should just listen to those feelings. Without understanding nafs al-shaytan and nafs al-rahman and the role that both play in dictating the direction that you take in life. So really understanding this concept that parents are shepherds, emotional regulation, right? We have to be able to regulate our own emotions. And this is something that's very often done in counseling, right? Psycho-spiritual counseling. I'm not talking about secular counseling, which can be very different. And something that if I'm composed and I can control myself, I am modeling for my child how to control themselves in the tidal waves of life when they hit. Because they will hit, it's inevitable. But if they viewed me and learned from me through observational learning, like Albert Bandura talks about, he talks about observational learning. Children learn by watching you for the first decade of their life. All they really have is you. They have no choice. So if all they're seeing is a dysregulated nervous system and adult who, when they get upset, they yell at them. They force them to do things they don't want to do and they're not being heard. So like Hussai was saying, they also are leaders in a sense. We have to listen to them, but we're shepherds. We are guiding them. I'm providing the lanes on the road so that they don't swerve in the wrong direction and go too far that will lead them astray. I'm there to like nurture them back and bring them back lovingly, right? Because I'm able to, again, stay composed. And I'm aligned with my values and my principles. I act for a place of principle, not based on how I feel and what I want to do or not do. So I think this is really key in just keeping in mind that our faith is about long-term gain and perhaps in this dunya short-term loss. And we have to be able to explain this. You're gonna perceivingly lose some things. You might lose some fun. You might lose some opportunities, but were they actually beneficial opportunities in the long-term? You may lose some popularity and fame. You may not be in the spotlight, but that's not what we desire anyways, right? Because if we're people of principle, it's about what Allah thinks of us. And where my standing is with Allah's Parvata in the Akhira. And this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's installing this mindset into your family's minds. It's like a filtration system to seek out long-term gain. With Ramadan coming, teaching your child everything that you're going to gain at the end of this month, experientially, and having many conversations with them about what it is that they're gaining. And this is connecting them to their why. And with that, I will stop here so that we can hear from the musician. Hey, it's all right, can everyone hear me? I was invited here to be on the parents panel. So I'll talk a little bit about parenting. It's nice to see these kids here. I know many of you. Amen, it's long like them. How you doing? I remember being your age, and that's where I'll start. I remember thinking about Christmas and how exciting it was because I didn't have a lot of Muslim family around me. And I spent 25 years in corporate America. And one thing I noticed is that every, the week of Thanksgiving, things kind of change. Nobody can put their finger on it, but in the office environment, things kind of change. All these stressed out people is kind of chill out. And then they start thinking about family. They don't think about their bonuses. They worry about their bonus because they have to spend money. That comes later in the year after Christmas. And I watched them, you know, because I didn't really feel a lot of things about Ramadan. I didn't have any feelings in my heart. It's kind of dead. My teachers would talk about looking forward to Ramadan, and I'd be like, hmm, why is my heart not connected? But I'd feel people around me feel for Christmas. So I felt like I'm neither here nor there. I don't belong here, I don't belong there. I don't feel it for Christmas, but I can observe them like I can observe a bunch of, you know, like a society, like an anthropologist kind of observing them. And one thing I realized, what they do is they, number one, they slow down. They really slow down. You know, the thing that has to be like really urgently done, it doesn't get done. It's okay, it's all right. They're kind of chill. It's almost like your parent is like, man, I know he's gonna get mad at me, but wow, he's kind of chill today. I got away with one, you know? The boss is kind of like that. Number two, they kind of breathe. They take a long-term look. They're not gonna hire an interview and do those things in December. It's like, no, December's not for that. We're gonna worry about that at the end of the year. They kind of chill out. What else do they do? They listen more. They listen to each other. Instead of just work, it's about family. Hey, how are your kids doing? Where are you going on vacation? Where are you gonna spend Christmas? They kind of listen, because they're interested in something else, right? All of a sudden they're interested in something else. And then what they do is they sort of enjoy each other. They're really listening. It's not like, hey, Bob, how are your kids? We're on the elevator. You're half-sentenced. Hey, my kid's like, oh, okay, bye. See ya. He just gets off the elevator and leaves. They actually enjoy each other's words. They enjoy each other's companies. And the other thing is they feel a sense of love. They feel a sense of love for humanity. And because I'm the person that's in the office and I see them every day, I feel like they have a little more love for me. So it's kind of interesting, right? So if you're not connected to their society, you can definitely feel a change. So what I did was wonder why that change didn't happen in my heart. I remember when I was 12 years old, I was Amon's age, are you 12? 11? 13, 12. Star Wars came out. That was cool, right? I didn't know how good Star Wars would be, but then I remember when the second one came out, the number five, right? They call it number five now. Empire Strikes Back. Man, I was excited. But what's wrong with me? I don't look forward to Ramadan like that. What's wrong with me? You know, I wondered, I wondered. Because people didn't talk to me about what the sister Hema said. People didn't talk to me about the why. They talked to me about do this, do that, but not the why. So leaving Islam becomes a huge door, just becomes a huge door. And it's sad because you have to do the oba for your days. So it's hard being a parent now, but I look back at myself, it was always hard. 12 was hard, 15 was hard, 17 was hard. So my advice to parents is don't fall asleep on how hard it is to be a kid when you come home. Because you're, Alhamdulillah, you're here, you're a Muslim. If you're listening to this live stream, you're a Muslim, Alhamdulillah. But are you sure your kids are gonna be a Muslim? Are you sure they're gonna enjoy Ramadan? Are you sure they're gonna care? I remember thinking, I'm more excited about the kickoff to the football season than I am about Ramadan. I'm not happy to say that, but it actually happened to me. A lot. I can't remember the score of the first game. It's just silly, it's dumb. But I'm looking forward, so forward to that moment of the year, why am I not looking forward to Ramadan? Because I didn't know the why. I didn't know the why. So there's two things you need to know. You need to know the why. So always ask why. And make your parents sit down, chill out, relax, breathe, listen. Let's help each other out. And the other thing you need to know is you need to know the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Because when you look at how difficult his life was, you kind of feel ashamed for complaining. It's like, it's not that bad. I mean, Masha'Allah, he suffered through everything. And Allah swt loved him as the best of creation. Why? So that if you can look at his life, you can bear it. And my favorite story of, as being a parent, just my favorite story of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is a very simple story. It's the fact that he sat down with a child who lost his bird. Like he was running in Umma. He had so much responsibility, war, enemies, wanaf ebun, people destroying the religion. But he cared about the kid who had a bird who lost his bird. He cared about that little heart. And if he cared about that little heart on the street of Medina, we should care about the hearts of our children. It doesn't matter what your boss did. Come home, leave that mailbox closed. I used to have a friend, he would tell me that he would hate it when his dad would grab the mail from the mailbox and come in the door. Because he saw the bills. He got stressed out, then he'd come in angry. He'd take it out on somebody. That's tyrannical. Like, what did those children do to deserve your anger? You're taking out the anger of the whole day onto the kids and they're happy to see you. They're supposed to be happy to see you. I know someone who told me that when the garage door opens, shh, they just go, oh man, dad's home, dad's home. Just brutal, right? But we parents love our children. I can honestly tell you that father loved his children. I know who those children were. And I know that father. I went to college with him. He loved his children, but he didn't stop and think. And so, Hamdullah, we have the ability to stop and think. We have the ability to look at Ramadan and say, you know what, tonight, tonight, we can be 10% better. But by the time Ramadan starts, we can be 20% better. Just let's start to breathe. Let's start to chill out. Let's start to, maybe the kids could not fight, throw paint on each other, have a food fight and if dad comes home, that would help. That would help. And maybe the dad, not check the bills when he comes home, that would help, right? We can all help each other out because it's hard being a parent. It's hard being a kid. So Hamdullah, you know, I raised my children. I have three boys, some of you know them, masha'Allah. And my goal was, it's a simple goal, don't let them get lost like I did. Don't do what I did. Make sure you're looking at that little lamp in their heart and make sure that you're kindling it, that you're working it. And I need to ask them, you know, if I'm taking you over here on a Friday night, you wanna be here, I gotta find, I can't just force you over here. You're not gonna like it. So I try to take them to places they liked, try to do things they liked. So what can we do for Ramadan? We can enjoy our community. We can have a moonsighting festival. We can go out there. And if you don't have community, you don't know. There's two places in the Bay Area, maybe three now. But Lawrence Livermore Labs, there's a entire bunch of families that come for moonsighting. So in the community, come out there, take treats, give children a great, great night, great beginning to Ramadan. Bake cookies for your neighbors. Tell them that this is a Ramadan treat for you to see, you know, Masha'Allah, just spread the barakah. Bake with them. Decorate. I know a family that had a shukr jar. So every night before Ramadan, they would write little gratitude slips in Shaban. Then they would take those slips, they would make them into a chain, they would decorate them out of the door. You go to the house, you're like, what is that chain? It's like all the shukr that our family has before Ramadan starts. It's kind of like aiming your gun. You want to aim your gun before you shoot it. Just kind of line it up this way, line it up this way, or it's gonna miss. So Alhamdulillah, there's a lot of things we can talk about. I'm so proud of you guys to be here. I mean, God knows where I was on a Friday night. You know, probably out with my skateboard when I was 12, waiting for Star Wars to come. And Masha'Allah, there's, by advice with parents, before you have parents, before you have children, or even after you have children, or even tonight, if you haven't done it, you've gotta get on the same page. You've gotta get on the same page. And there's one very, very important reason for that, is because the mother is the teacher. She's the nurture, but the father is the validator. Right, if you type into a file and you work all day and you type something and you don't save it, you just close it, it's gone. So the mother does all the typing, she nurtures the children. And the father comes and says close, boom, gone. Religion's gone. But if the father says save, everything gets saved. So the children look to the mother for learning, they look to the father for validation. The father can just delete everything. If he's not on the same page. So get on the same page. Teach with love. Just remember one story. If you have children, just remember the Prophet, the Prophet said, Allah, who is sitting with someone else's child because of their bird. And make the home. The home, Islam has to work. If your children are seeing that Islam's not working, the home, parents don't get along. In-law battles, whatever, God knows whatever. I'm sure the therapists know all about these stories. Islam has to work in the home. Otherwise, you're opening a big, wide door. A truck can drive through it. Kids are just gonna take Islam and just leave. So Islam has to work. As parents, we have to make Islam work. Masha'Allah, I see the parents bringing you guys here when children play and make noise. Hey, let them play and make noise. They're happy, they're jumping around the mosque. I wasn't even anywhere near one. So, lead with that. So I mentioned a couple of things. The barakah jar, the chain you can make, alight the house, get lanterns. Do an art project and then decorate. Date with the kids and share the cookies. Go before Ramadan and work in a food bank just to prepare your mind for how hungry people are. Go to a food bank and work there and see people come by and get food. Just the morsel, the morsel food that goes into a hungry person's belly. Just, it's far greater than our fasting morsels. And we know how sweet dates taste after Ramadan. The pakoras, the dates, and the ru'afza, whatever you get going. Make Eid morning a good day. You know, slow down. So running around in Ramadan, doing tons of itharas, getting stressed out, doing groceries, slow down. We all have food on our tables. Invite people for simple meals, spend time together, insha'Allah. So, alhamdulillah, you know, I look forward. I try to strive for the day that my, I look forward to Ramadan more than I look forward to the next Star Wars movie. I've outgrown those a little bit. I haven't outgrown the football, the excitement for football. But, mashallah, I look forward to the day to strive to get as excited about Ramadan. And insha'Allah, I'm really excited. My teachers have really put a lot of knowledge in me about the why. And so now I know. So I don't feel lost. I know I'm not enjoying Christmas. I'm observing, but I'm enjoying Ramadan. And then the Moonsighting Party that's out at Lawrence Livermore Lab. I live for that. I live for that. And we play some Ramadan music on the way over. My kids sing. And so we really enjoy that. So, Jazakallah khair for being here. And Jazakallah khair for listening to me. And, you know, we can all be better, insha'Allah. We ask Allah SWT to give us this beautiful, beautiful month, like a gift. It's like the weekend of the year, right? Weekend of the year. You guys all look forward to the weekend. But the thing is, it can't be too, too crazy and busy. We've got to just enjoy each other, enjoy the Quran, enjoy the fasting. And the rest will come, insha'Allah. And love the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And think about the boy with the bird. Assalamu alaykum. How old was he when Star Wars came out? Oh, man. He's not been the same. He was just born. I hate, I actually hate Star Wars, sorry. I'm an Avenger guy, so. There was an eject button? Yeah, I know, man, yeah. You have to pick either Avenger or Star Wars, right? Oh, that's true, that's true. Yeah, you have to pick. Jazakallah khair, beautiful. For me, I think the family relationship is interesting because it's, I was, before I was practicing, I was a young man, I had to go to a translator office to translate a letter from Persian, from Farsi to English back in the days to send it to the embassy for some legal work back home. I was sitting there, and the thing, sometimes you remember, you know why you remember them? Because I don't even remember what that letter was that I was translating, because it was very important, but I don't remember what it was. But there was a magazine, a Persian magazine, while the guy, I was in the waiting room in the city, I started reading, I was reading it, and there was a chapter, there was a hadith of our Prophet, peace be upon him, in one page. It's called The Wisdom of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and there was a few hadiths. But one of the hadiths that really struck me, and kind of like paradigm shift in my head, was that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said that they're not from my ummah, from amongst us, the adults who don't have mercy and love towards the children, and the children who don't honor adults. And I think that is all of Islam, like if you wanna summarize all of Islam, it's a love and honorable relationship between the children and parents. And those parents who disrespect, those children who disrespect their parents, there's no good in them, there's no good in them. And they won't see any good, because Allah's not gonna give Tawfiq to those kids who disrespect their parents. But if they have patience, and they have love, and they have adab, Allah will open up the heart of even the parents that are rigid. And those who don't, there are some parents, unfortunately, they're not on a prophetic path, but you can kill with kindness like this in this culture. And for children, I tell you something, you have to know how to say something to your parents. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And it will make a big difference in that conversation when it's with love and with respect and with honor. It'll be mutually love and respect and honor. And parents should be like friends with their children. And this is one of the tragedies of our time now that people get married really late. And traditionally, it's encouraged that people get married early in our tradition. As-salamu alaykum. As-salamu alaykum. One of the things you hasten is to get married early because by the time your child is a teenager and like 14-year-old, if you're in your late 40s in that time, and he says, hey, Baba, I wanna play basketball, or I wanna play football, and I can't, 15 minutes you're out, then he's gonna find somebody on the court who become his father. Like, and that's the big problem that you can't, if you're not there playing basketball with your son or playing football with your son, or running or wrestling or having, they're gonna find somebody else to do that with. And that's very important that we encourage our children in the future, inshallah, that the next generation, they don't wait till, oh, I have to wait for this, I have to wait for that, I have to wait for this, until I get married. They get married at a younger age and start their life, Allah will put barak in their life, and then, so they're, they have a relationship and the language barrier and the social life barrier is not so much what they don't understand. So I'll give you an example. Majority of these kids this age right now, the Muslim kids, the parents have no idea about what they know in terms of just social media. Like, the amount of knowledge they have, like, we won't even be able to like, log in to some of these stuff, like, somebody was saying, TikTok, I said, they showed, they're showing me, I said, no, you should do this for your business. And I watched it for like 15 minutes, I couldn't even, I said, how do you even start? And they were like, this little kid, he was just going, no, no, no, no, uncle, you should do this, let it go like this. And they made a video and he said, here, this is how you post it. I swear, I couldn't figure it out. I can't even work out the remote for the TV. I have to call my kids, come, turn on the, you know, we have to watch something. We don't have cable, alhamdulillah. We, I stopped having TV at the house when I was, when I first start practicing. No TV, no cable. But then we have TV, we have no cable, alhamdulillah. We need to see something like, because my kids, they want to watch the highlights from the NBA. So we do that. But I can't figure it out. I can't turn on, honestly, is the remote so complicated now? Is like, how do you go through all these menus or how do you even work the PS5? Like, I swear, if they do this, it's so complicated, just looking at it, it just drives you nuts. So that gap of, so how do you even, like that gap is so much where we, but if that gap is closer, they know what's happening. And that communication becomes, you know, and I tell you something, what do you guys talk about when you drop off, when you go to school? Because sometimes you drive for like 20 minutes, 30 minutes with your kids and there's nothing you can talk about. Like literally, like Zoom, like, in Persian Zoom means like, you're silent. So you're just like sitting there, no, nothing. Cause I don't have, I don't, I don't know, people think I'm crazy, but I don't listen to music, huh? Yeah. So, but it's just like, what do you talk about? So I realized that you have to talk about something that they are interested in. Not something that you're interested in, people, you know, one of my favorite things, we were at the Rahala and I was teaching a class on poetry. And so somebody went to my kid and they said, oh, does your dad tell you all the roomie story? And he gives you that, he's, and my son was like, he was just like, he was young. And he said, no, he's my dad. Like, what are you talking about? Like, but that's what dad is supposed to be, not supposed to be there. And you know, I do this and you know, just have a good time, have a relationship where you can talk with each other, you know. And I tell you something, if your kid is holding on to you, it's like, mama, mama, mama, mama, and you're on your phone, say, hold on, hold on, hold on. That would reverse in about 10 years and it'd be sunset, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. It's exactly what's gonna happen. So you have to give them the time now, pay attention to them, become friends, have something to talk about, whatever they're interested. I swear to you, I hated sports after I stopped watching, you know, I threw away my TV and stuff when I started practicing. I just, I just went, I just stopped watching everything. I just, I didn't, I wasn't interested. But I started learning about basketball because I just, my son liked basketball. So I wanna learn about it. I wanna know who are the new superstars and so we can have a conversation. Other than that, what are you gonna talk about with your children? Like about what you're interested in only, you know? So if we show interest in them and learn what they're interested in and have some kind of common grounds with this conversation. And in this conversation, things will come out and they will start telling you once you become friends with them. And there has to be a friendship and children should learn something about their parents. And that's love. If you love your mom, if you love your dad, if they're doing coding, just show some interest. What's coding? Listen, show me how it works. Can you do something like this? If there are doctors saying, hey, tell me about what happened in the hospital? Like, you know, do people get sick? How did you fix it? You booked it? So show some interest in what they do and the parents show interest with their kids. That is a functional family where everybody's interested in everybody. And relationships are never one way. It's two ways, right? It's two ways. They say a Turkish man went to ask for a girl and said, I wanna marry her. And he came back home happy. He said, what happened? Did they say, is it 100% confirmed? He said, no, 50% confirmed. He said, what do you mean 50%? He said, me and my family say yes, them and their family said no. But that's not a relationship. A relationship is when both is mutually, both are interested in. So may Allah make us amongst people that we actually think when our child is 12, let me think when I was 12. What grade was I in? What was I doing? How could I deal with my son? So at every stage of life, just think where you were. And I tell you something. I always say, they are better than the parents and that age that they're in because the parents are doing worse than the kids. So just be grateful, say, Alhamdulillah and just have a relationship with them. And inshallah, that is mutually. The children as well. Love and respect your parents. The greatest gift Allah has given you is your parents. And you wouldn't know the value of it until you lose them and Allah don't make you lose your parents. But once they're gone, it's too late. And then you're gonna regret for the rest of your life. And the same with the parents. Your children are treasured Allah's given you. You don't know the value of it, la qadrullah. You can't even think about losing your children because you become hollow and it's because you will die with them. The parents will die with the child. And that's the nature of this world. That's how Allah made it. So Allah protect the families, have mercy, have love with each other, respect each other, honor each other. Eat together, pray together, have fun together, watch a movie together, everything within the boundaries of sharia. But just have fun too. Like have real fun with your kids. If you're strong enough, wrestle them. See, show them who's the man in the house, right? Yeah, who's the boss. Alhamdulillah. Jazakallah khayr. You wanna end this, inshallah. O sisr al-Husaykin. Inshallah, we'll wrap up soon. Jazakallah khayr. And thank you everyone for being here. Thank you to our esteemed panelists. May Allah reward all of you. As Mashallah brother Zeeshan and Asad Fridun and sister Haba were speaking, a lot of different thoughts, I'm sure were coming to your mind just as they were to my mind. But I think as we look forward to planning for Ramadan, one of the advice I can give all of you a takeaway is to come up with a plan, a family plan, please. Come strategize. Don't squander this moment, right? Today was, of course, earlier today was Nifshaban. And this is a blessed day for many reasons. But it's also a day where we don't know, I was reminded today from another teacher, we actually don't know if we're going to see Ramadan. None of us have a guarantee. Not one of us can say that we will actually welcome the month of Ramadan, right? And when you have that hyper-vigilance of your own mortality and the possibilities which only Allah knows, then what it does is it makes you take your life more seriously and to start appreciating everything you have, including your family. So don't squander these next two weeks with just going right back to work and everything else because Shaban, one of its names is it's the forgotten or neglected month. People become careless at this time. And then Ramadan suddenly comes and all of a sudden we're in a frenzy and we're panicking, go get meat, go get dates and everybody's kind of running around and nobody's happy. You have two weeks to come up with a family plan which is let's talk about what we're gonna do. How are we gonna embrace this month? Insha'Allah, if Allah rewards us with it and how are we going to come together as a family? So some of the basic things that I can offer you just from my own family is make sure you pray your prayers together, please. If you are home, some of us are still working from home because of COVID, please make it a commitment in the month of Ramadan that the family prays together. For the men, you are the imam of the household. Lead your family in prayer. Please take that leadership seriously. Don't just delegate it to someone else and for the women as well. Support your children. Remind them gently to prepare for prayer, not five minutes before the adhan. But remind them during the day, do you have voodoo? We're gonna pray soon. Give them those gentle reminders so that when the prayer comes, everybody's ready and we're not rushing. For Fajr, the same thing. Gently wake each other up. Have nice alarms. Someone designated as the Fajr person and there's always someone in the family. There's someone who always wakes up early and can do it. Designate them the gentle person who wakes everybody up gently for Fajr because we should do everything with ease, right? If ease is removed, then it becomes, we don't have to feel. So do things like that and of course, give roles to each other. So for the children, the young children, give them the role of preparing the dates for the iftar. Please think of these things. The leadership roles that I was talking about earlier. Start treating your children with more respect and give them these roles and watch how they'll come up and measure up. Instead of, for the women, we always take so much on ourselves that we're spread too thin and then it spills over and we don't have nice, beautiful homes but we can really start planning that now. So please in the remaining two weeks have this agenda of how we're going to have a beautiful blessed Ramadan by strategizing, by assigning roles, by really calling each other, the best of each other forward and inshallah may Allah give all of us Taufiq. Jazakumul akhid. And again, thank you to all of our panelists. Thank you to MCC. Thank you to all the viewers for watching on live. Inshallah we are going to have our other program which was initially, we were hoping to do the parents don't understand. The third installment of that but we've decided to wait for that after Ramadan, inshallah. So please look at the newsletter. We'll update all of that but Alhamdulillah, our esteemed panelists were able to come and join us for this event. So Jazakumul akhid and your questions by the way that you submitted will be answered at that panel discussion, inshallah. So please keep sending in your questions. We are reading all of them and we will answer those questions. Jazakumul akhid. We're going to pray Isha soon. So I don't know if, can you close us out in Dara? You want to close us out in Dara, inshallah? Let's just fight on Dara. Wa ala asri inna al insana al fighus illa al dina wa amilu sara'i hati wa tawasaw bil haib wa tawasaw bil sara'i. Amin ya Rabbi al ala ilameen, Bismillah. Because it's time for Isha, inshallah. Somebody is going to call the head on.