 We are an immense blessing that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has given us the ability to have security, to have peace, to have the ability to gather together without any fear, without any worry, to have the ability to see our fellow brothers and sisters, to have the ability to spend time with our families, to have the ability to eat all sorts of foods from all different parts of the world, to have the ability to drink water, to drink juice, to drink all sorts of blessings that Allah has given us. And while we sit amidst all of these blessings, and as Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, وَإِنْتَعْوَدُواْ نَأْمَنْطُواْ لَاَتُرْصُوْحَ that if you were to try to count or enumerate the blessings of Allah, you would not be able to do so. It's very difficult to count all of the blessings that Allah has given us inwardly in our bodies, outwardly in our life, and all of the other societal and communal blessings that our Lord has given us. But we all have this heaviness that we continue to feel as we see the struggle that our brothers and sisters in Raza continue to go through as this Zionist, Satanic, dark onslaught continues against them, and as very, very, very few nations, very few people, or very few of those in power actually have the courage to stand up and to do anything about that. And this is not something new, brothers and sisters. This this approach that has been taken is part of the Western playbook. It's something that's been done for decades, and maybe it's now something because up we can finally see in a very up close and personal way because of the advent of social media and because of how widely it's proliferated what's actually happening. But the Americans, they did this in Iraq, they did this in Afghanistan, they did this in Vietnam, many other Western nations have done this in areas that they have colonized. And when they are doing these types of things, the hope is that people don't rise up, that people don't actually know what's going on, that they can obfuscate the truth enough. This is the common word here known as propaganda, but that they can obfuscate the truth enough such that they can just make it seem like we're doing our best. They issue a few statements to make it seem like they actually care about the people. Meanwhile, they continue to commit their genocidal crimes, they continue to commit their war crimes, they continue to commit atrocities that nobody ever thought were possible for a human being to be able to commit. And what they are counting on and relying on is for the masses in the world to just ignore or at minimum to just kind of remain in a drowsy type of sleep and just observe a few things, say a few things and not actually do anything. And surely what they are counting on is that people after this happens will just forget about it and will just continue to move on with their lives. And so society, the way in which society has been set up, the way in which the society that we live in has been set up, the way in which western epistemology has been set up, the way in which educational frameworks and the education that we have gone through or many of our children are going through right now in school, it's very set up in a very intentional way. And that intention is one thing, to keep people just asleep enough to not actually question things, to keep people just asleep enough to not actually rise up and do anything about it, to keep people just asleep enough such that they buy what's actually coming to them. Now we're in a situation where Alhamdulillah, and this is mostly coming now from those who are younger, from the younger generation where people are really starting to wake up, where people are really starting to call into question the lies that the government has been feeding them. People are really starting to question the lies of the Zionist regime. This was not the case for many decades. People would just believe it outright. And anything that these people said, people would just accept it to be true, because they have all of the advanced technology, they have all of the economic power, they have such strong presence and the global stage, such strong hegemony, that it was very difficult to actually challenge these things and very difficult to question these things. The question though that we have to ask ourselves as we continue to see these difficult, these crimes that are happening, and as we struggle with them emotionally and as we grapple with what can we actually do is how ready are we as Muslims living in very privileged, safe, blessed, suburban societies to change our life and to transform ourselves such that if and when, not really just if, when these type of things start to happen and they start to happen in the United States of America, are we actually going to be ready to respond in the right way? How ready are we to actually do the work that it takes to transform such that we can be in proper solidarity with our brothers and sisters? Because it's one thing to use phrases and be in solidarity, it's another thing to match those phrases with action, and it's a totally different thing to be on the front lines and helping and serving and being somebody who's on the ground doing something about it. We can't do the latter, that's not possible right now, but are we even doing the first two? Are we even taking this as a means to transform our life? Are we taking the lessons that we are learning from the resilience of the Palestinians to actually foster some type of resilience in our life? Or are we just continuing, and we've mentioned this before, to just remain comfortable in our nice suburban, ginormous homes with our luxury cars, with all of our fancy vacations, with all of the social gatherings that we go to, with the top-notch quote-unquote schools that we want to send our children to just kind of remaining under the radar and comfortable focusing on this investment and this way to increase my money and this way to increase my wealth. And is that the calling that we've, is that what we've had, what the calling, where the calling has fallen to as Muslims? Because this is not what your Nabi, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, called you to. He didn't call us to just stay under the radar. If you study the lives of all of the prophets, one of the amazing things is that every prophet was actually a revolutionary in their times. And many times in the way in which the prophets are talked about, not in the Quran and the Quran, obviously it's accurate, in the other scriptures, they try to obfuscate this fact. But it's very much the case. The prophets, they brought a questioning of authority into society. They brought a questioning of the economic systems of society, of the political systems, of the educational systems. All of these things were up for question. And they questioned them and they challenged them and then they did something about them. And the hope was, especially the hope for this ummah, is that after the prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he's the last and final messenger. But does that mean that the message stops? Does that mean that the work stops? Does that mean that the da'wah stops? Traditionally, many of the other prophets, especially the prophets of bunny Israel, they would have prophet after prophet. Sometimes multiple prophets at the same time in this region and in this region. So you had multiple people in leadership capacities who had divine mandates to do something, to call people, to preach to people, to help people, to reform people. They were, this was going on. But the prophets Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, this work didn't stop after he passed away. He did pass it on. He said, Al-ulama al-waratha al-anbiya, the ulama, the scholars or the inheritors of the prophets, meaning they are the people who will be at the forefront of continuing this work. And then that activation that the prophets bring to activate society to actually do something about the wrongs that are going on, that's supposed to spread. That's supposed to spread. But we have fallen on hard times as Muslims globally, not just here in the United States. The Muslims have fallen on hard times, Muslim nations, Muslim leaders. It's like everything is happening and people are just pretending that they can't do anything about it. Nobody, very, very, very few Muslim nations, even though they have power, they have the resources are doing anything. You have one, you have literally a nation run by rebel forces right now, Yemen, which actually had the audacity to even say something and do something by their blockade in the Red Sea and by their activities in the Red Sea. Why? Well, they don't have any Western money going to them. There's no, they're not puppets of the Western regimes, but every other Muslim country, they're all just, the dunya has gotten so deeply entrenched and the corruption has become so widespread and the idolization of the West, the bowing down to the white man, the bowing down to the Western leadership has become so entrenched that the courage just doesn't exist to do something. But does that mean that that's okay? No, of course not. Does that mean that we just all continue to be asleep? No, what happens when the dunya becomes so such a strong force in someone's life that you can fall asleep and just be okay with these atrocities going on, that people can look and I'm talking about people who actually have power and ability to do something. Obviously for us, it's very different. Our main effort that we can direct is towards civic engagement and towards dua and towards transforming our life. But it happens such that when the heart dies, as Allah says in the Quran, that the heart can have a lock on it, that their sight becomes blind, that they become blind spiritually, they become deaf spiritually, they stop listening, they stop understanding. And that's what happens, that you can see children begging for help, begging for assistance, four-year-olds, five-year-olds, six-year-olds whose parents are no longer there, they're asking for assistance. Who's supposed to assist them? You don't think Allah's going to ask the leaders who had power, why didn't you do anything? Meanwhile, issuing statements left and right, but no action is taken. That's what happens when the heart dies. When the heart dies, do you start having a situation in which nobody can actually wake you up and jolt you when the heart just goes into a complete dead state? We want to prevent ourselves from getting there. But en masse globally as Muslims, we have started to go towards a trend where our hearts are starting to die because we forgot what gives the heart life as Muslims. Because Western society and Western ideals, all of these, and they have a very dejalic theme to them as we get closer and closer to the end of times, they have a way of just slowly putting the heart to death. A society filled with haram, with promiscuity, with alcohol, with partying, with drinking, with smoking, with all these sorts of things. This is what's happening in the average school. If you think that it's not happening in your child's school, just go and just dress up like a teenager one day and you'll observe the types of conversations that are happening. You'll observe the types of things that are happening here in the Bay Area, East Bay Schools, the types of façade and haram that children, 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds are being called to. And 15, 20 years ago, it was pretty bad. It's much worse now. Now their fundamental principles are being questioned. People aren't even, they don't even know anymore. They're being told to question their basic gender identities. This is the level of façade that's happening. So if this is what the Western framework is trying to bring, what's our response as Muslims? Do we just go with the flow? Do we just follow what everybody else is doing? No, the Muslims were never followers. The Muslims were always leaders. The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam told us and he was sent as a leader to bring and cultivate other leaders, not just to go with the masses and to go with the flow. So we have to ask ourselves, what are we going to do to reform? The reality is, and our scholars have been saying this for some time, we need a global toba as Muslims. What is toba? A global turning back to our Lord. Turning back to our Lord, not just in a personal way, in a communal way. When communities and societies and the Ummah is one community turns back to their Lord, gets rid of all the dark traits that we have inside of us, actually asks Allah to reform our hearts deep down inside and to become people of Nur and people of light. That's when change starts to happen. And the proof is in the Sahaba. You have the handfuls of people, dozens to hundreds of people that grew and they transformed the entire world. They transformed entire parts of society. They were able to portion small amounts, were able to take on huge armies. What is that? When the yakin and the Nur is so strong in the heart and when someone understands their purpose in life and they have been activated and now they are doing work that Allah wants them to do, now the transformation can happen and the numbers don't matter because Allah assists those people with his unseen forces. But the first step is to make that intention and make that step towards change and make that step towards a global toba and to just be aware of the fact that there is an intentional agenda starting from early years in school all the way until one graduates college, the majority of the education and that is taught in public schools, which are government schools, is Zionist stamped and approved. And if you don't believe me, go and look into the history books and just see how much they talk. They only talk about one genocide frequently in school and that genocide is the Holocaust which is obviously a terrible event that took place. But there's a lot of genocides that took place throughout history and that took place more recently, the Rwandan genocide, the genocide in Darfur, the Armenian genocide and so on. There's many, many, many others that also took place. Why is there so much of a focus on a singular Eurocentric view on history? Because they want to try to make that the dominant view. They don't want the Muslims to know about their own history. They don't want you to know about your own history. They'll talk about the European dark ages but they won't talk about the Islamic golden ages that were going on at the same time. They'll use words like the Moors. I remember when I was in high school, they were talking about the Moors in Spain and I was like, what are these Moors? I had no idea this was the Muslims. They wouldn't even call them the Muslims. They didn't even use our name appropriately for the way in which they would talk about our people. This is what our children are learning. So now this is what our children are learning and then they come home to us and they're just watching TV, scrolling on their screens, playing video games, no conversations are happening in the homes. There's no counter learning going on. There's no counter education going on that when darkness is happening, there's no counter balance with light and we're just kind of going with the flow, doing everything everybody else is doing. What's gonna happen to the hearts of our children? What's gonna happen to the hearts of the masses of the community? At minimum, the courage will be gone. At minimum, what's gonna happen is that we'll start to have a questioning of our identity, questioning of our own self-worth. Questioning of seeing ourselves is kind of less than everybody else from a dignity perspective and just starting to be, I can't really say much because this is gonna happen and this is gonna happen and I'm worried about this and I'm worried about that. That's the minimum that's gonna happen. But the other, the spiritual effects can be far worse. The spiritual effects of all of this dark pedagogy that's being instilled into the minds of our youth, that can be far, far, far worse. So we have to ask ourselves, what is our moral responsibility in the times that we live in? The time for sleeping is gone. It's time to wake up. This is a wake up call for us globally and it begins with ourselves individually and then we have to spread it then communally. There's five or six steps that practically I would advise all of us start to take to actually begin this transformation that Allah and His Messenger have laid out, Allah in the Quran and the Messenger of Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in the way in which he lived his life. The first and foremost step, and this is very, should be very obvious to us, but it's very difficult to practice is to take the prayer seriously in our life. Take the Salat seriously. It is not this optional thing that we do when we feel like it, when we want it, when we're not tired, when we have energy that we just skip out on when we're traveling or when we're hanging out with people. We just ignore, no, the prayer is serious. It's a serious thing Allah mentions again and again in the Quran, not just to pray. Aqima Salat, establish the prayer, meaning make it a firm part of your life that you can never, ever waiver from it. That's at the basic level that all of us have to start asking ourselves if our Palestinian brothers and sisters while they're being bombarded incessantly, while they have no food, no water, no resources, while they're still able to, they're turning to Allah. And if anybody has an excuse, it's people in those instances and circumstances and they're establishing the prayer. And you have Muslims all over the world who are in adversity, but they're the ones turning to Allah the most. What about us who are living in full luxury relatively? Relatively, everything is good. And yet we still don't pray. We still don't wake up for Fajr. We still don't pray our prayers. We skip Doha or Asr because we have work meetings to serve some corporation and forgetting that our Lord that we have to serve who's above all of these corporations and all of these people of Dunya. That we forget all of these things. We have to make the prayer firm. And it begins with making it firm in our life and then making it firm as a community obligation. Then traditionally, men always prayed at least one to two prayers in congregation in the masjid. If we live anywhere within 10 minutes driving distance of a masjid, we need to make a firm intention that we're gonna at least pray one prayer in the masjid. These types of events, the rows of the masjid during Fajr and Isha should be full. They should be full just like they're full during Salatul Jumma. Because that's the time you first organize in the rows of the masjid and in the rows of the prayer. And then the rows of when you have to go up against the enemy when that time comes, those rows will be organized if that ever has to happen. But the rows, if the first established rows are not there, there's a reason why we line up straight and why we establish ourselves as a community. This is important for men to do. It's not just this thing that we ignore. No, this is a sunnah, aqadah and emphasize sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. Not something we just ignore and we just leave. So if we're farther out from the masjid and we can't make it, at minimum at homes in congregation in our home. But we have to start getting back. These are the basics, the fundamentals. The sahaba, it was like a huge deal to miss a single prayer in congregation. The reward of the prayer in congregation is 27 times more than praying by yourself. And every step or minute you drive towards the masjid, one hadith says every step you take as you're walking towards the masjid, your sins are being forgiven, you are being elevated in degrees, you are being given good deeds. So this is the way in which traditionally, once people get together in the masjid, now they can begin discussing the situations that are going on in the ummah. It's not meant to just be that we're doing all of this alone in our own homes. So at minimum, establishing the prayer at home, making it consistent. And that's the job, again, of the father, of the man, to establish the prayer. If we ourselves are not praying and showing our children that example, what are we doing? How can we show our children we're doing this and we're doing that and we're watching cricket and we're talking about politics, we're all of these things, but we can't even pray the salat in congregation. This is the call of the Muslim. This is the first thing the Prophet ﷺ established as he got to Medina. The first thing, why did he not do something else? Because aqima salat, it's the command that Allah gives. So establishing the prayer and making it a routine and getting it to the point where we bring ourselves and our children to the mosque, at least in one prayer a day. The second is that we should all make it a habit to find one gathering of knowledge or of zikr, like a class of some sort that we attend weekly as a family. We regularly attend all sorts of other functions, events, this hangout, this birthday party, this thing, that thing, we have to gather together to learn this deen. Iqra was the first revelation that came down, to read, to recite. Knowledge is at the center of our religion. At the center of our religion, it is a religion of learning because learning is what brings transformation. And many times we don't know what to learn, how to learn at home. It's not sufficient to only do it online and on YouTube. We have to gather together as a community because the more gatherings of knowledge that are taking place, the more nure that's descending down from the divine and that's descending down and facilitating the affairs of a certain community. And the more gatherings of façade and of haram and of wrongdoing that are taking place, the more darkness that's descending down. It's a very basic equation. So if you wanna see life transform, increase the things of nure, the acts of light, and if you wanna see your life transform, increase the acts of light, decrease the acts of darkness, and you'll start to see a very serious transformation. And when you couple a few of these things together, it's like ingredients in a reaction. When you couple a few of them together, the heart starts to wake up in a very serious way and it starts to be activated in a very serious way. That's why you can't just pick and choose and do one or two things as part of a religion. The religion has a code and a set of rules and rituals that we're supposed to follow with purpose and with intention. So find a class of some sort at minimum once a week that we attend with our families and make it a weekly habit. You will see a transformation. You will see a transformation because the knowledge that we're learning at minimum is counteracting all of the darkness that we're consuming throughout the day. We all know the types of filth that goes into our eyes on television, the things we're watching on our phones, the things that our children experience in school. We have to counteract that with some portion of khair during the week and some portion of good. The third is get serious about engaging with the Book of Allah, not reciting just a little bit in Ramadan, engaging with the Book of Allah. The Book of Allah is supposed to be a compass. It's supposed to be a means of guidance for our life. If you ever meet like a serious Christian, they have this thing called Bible study and they take it really seriously and you can ask a Christian about different parts of the Bible, about the Gospel according to Luke and Matthew and then this part of the Bible and this. And they know it and they will be able and this is like an average person. They're not like a very learned person or anything, just an average person but they take their book very, very seriously. And we have to ask ourselves, can we even, if we were to be asked what are the themes of Surah Al-Baqarah? What are the themes of Ali Imran? What is the message that Allah wants you to grapple with in Surah An-Nisa? Can we explain it or is it something we learned in Sunday school when we were young and we just forgot the rest? We have to engage with the knowledge that Allah has sent down in his book. Make it a habit five minutes before bed, 10 minutes before bed, engage with Allah's book and talk to your children about it. Talk to your children. This is what Allah is saying. What do we think it means in this time? We wouldn't be so surprised. The Bani Israel, Allah has been reprimanding them for that throughout history for all of the wrong that they were doing. And he rep mentions specifically they will continue to do wrong and continue to sow corruption. If we read that and we engage with that, we'll be able to understand in some divine context, okay, what's going on here and what is the response that my Lord wants me to have. I'll call you Krol-e-Hada and I'll talk for Allah. Alhamdulillah. Allahumma salli wa sallim wa baraka ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim. Ya ayyu aladina aminu ittaqullah haqqatu qati wa la tumatunna illa wa antu muslimoon. And as this transformation starts to happen individually, you will start to see it spreading throughout your family and spreading throughout your friends if enough people do it. You need a critical mass of people who start to wake up and then the light in those people becomes so strong that it just starts to spread through osmosis and this is what needs to happen. So the next step after we do these things individually is transform ourselves socially. Mashallah, the Muslim is very social people. Alhamdulillah, we get to see each other a lot, engage with each other in our communities, talk with each other, go over to each other's houses. But the question is, are these gatherings that we are doing, is there any element of doing these things for the sake of Allah or are we just doing these things for the sake of our own desires and for the sake of just meeting, for the sake of meeting. There is a way to transform the way in which we hang out, the way in which we interact with each other to be for the sake of our Lord. And in the time that we live in, at minimum we need to be talking about Palestine, thinking about Palestine, making the offer Palestine, doing some vicar and hoping that it is a means of bringing some relief, even if it brings relief for one family or for one person when we're gathering, if 10, 15, 20 Muslims are gathering, that has an effect, that has a power, that has an impact. So our social gathering can start to transform. If you ever go to the gatherings of the scholars, it's amazing because they'll spend 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes in remembrance of Allah at the beginning of the gathering. And there's still time to hang out and have dinner and so on. And then there will be some type of reminder or some type of beneficial a wa'ad of some sort. And then there is time to see how everybody is doing and to engage in eating and so on and so forth. But that has a spiritual effect. People are attending those gatherings regularly and there's hundreds of those going on every single week or every single month. That starts to now bring a transformative change into the community. So bring the knowledge of what we learned. Don't just make gatherings talking about this is what happened to the warriors. This is what happened on Game of Thrones. This, I saw this episode of the office. I mean, these trivial matters, these are, all of these people are run by Zionists anyways, if you want to go and look a little bit behind the scenes, you'll see that all of the entities that we're so attracted to, that we're so into, there are people who are going to be against us and are already against us at the end of the day. So at minimum, we can remember our people and start to make it a means of bringing hair for the ummah. And lastly, we manage people, masha'Allah, in our communities, have a lot of blessing economically and financially. That there are people of a lot of, masha'Allah, in this room, probably multiple people of multi-million dollar net worth. And so collectively there's a lot of financial power with the Muslims. The question is, do we direct that financial power collectively towards causes that are going to bring about substantive impact for Islam in America? Or do we just kind of do our own thing and give a little bit when we want and mainly focus on increasing the wealth for our own sake? Think about your responsibility if Allah has blessed us with wealth in some way, shape, or form. It's not just for no reason. There's a deep reason behind that. That well, you have a responsibility now with that wealth. Pick projects that you want to start. Pick an institution that you want to support. Make one specific cause that you want to dedicate yourself to and really, really, really find ways to gather together with people, to fund that cause, to further that cause. That's the minimum that we need to be doing because nobody is going to establish the institutions for us. Nobody is going to establish the schools and the colleges and the hospitals that are Muslim run for us. We have to gather together, use the intellects that Allah has given us and use the wealth and the power and the financial ability Allah has given us to do so. And masha'Allah, there are many role models we have in our community of people who have done this. And so if we know who those people are, we sit with them and learn from them and say, how can I be activated? And everybody in this room, and we'll end with this, insha'Allah, that I would encourage all of us, everybody if it could likely afford some part of this, that make some intention to support orphans right now all throughout the Muslim world. It's very, very, very impactful. I'm sure many people are facing this and seeing this. And I feel somewhat ashamed that this didn't hit me earlier when there was a crisis of orphans in Syria and in Yemen and in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And now we're seeing a very, very serious crisis in Gaza. But it costs $100, $200 a month to support an orphan. Go on to Islamic Relief, USA, penny aid, USA, these charities, they have ways to send money regularly to support an orphan. And at minimum, do that. And if you can do more, do more. But at minimum, we need to be using our wealth in whatever ways we can to support those who are in need. Your Nabi, sallallahu alayhi sallam, was an orphan. He was somebody who told us to help the orphans, to assist those who don't have parents, to assist those right now who are just wandering around looking for food and for water and nobody is able to guide them or to help them. But Allah is there and Allah wants to see, are we going to be activated to use our resources and our ability to help this ummah and to help the weak of this.