 It's really exciting to be talking about dynamic misadjid when the masjid is empty because of Omicron. So, Alhamdulillah for virtual misadjid and for the office space or the masjid space and the community spaces that we can actually continue to create online. And even if we're all watching at home, and most people are at home, Alhamdulillah for the ability to do that. It's not as exciting as when we're all together, but Alhamdulillah that we can all stay safe, protect our loved ones, protect our community, etc. So hopefully, if we're talking about misadjid, I really wanted to start off first with the original community that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and the Sahabah built. And very early on in Islamic history, when the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam first started receiving the message, there was Dar al-Arqa min Makkah, and then there was the community that they built in Medina. And I was hoping to actually focus on the community they built in Medina. And we were actually talking about this yesterday in her campus, Alhamdulillah. But towards the end of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam's time in Makkah, he started doing that with the tribes that are coming into Makkah during Hajj. And there is the famous story of him meeting the six young men from the Khazraj and them hearing the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and they said, oh, this is the Prophet that we hear about from the Jewish scripture and they believe in the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And then the oldest one in the group, a young man by the name of Asa'a-e-Muzarrar al-Dillan, he's 18 years old. And he tells the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he tells him, if you come with us now, you'll be the leader of the Khazraj and we have a horrible civil war. And we don't want you to be the leader of just one of the tribes, we want you to be a leader of both tribes. And Asa'a-e-Muzarrar was one of these people that are like in a very unique position because his father is from the Khazraj and his mom is from those. And the civil war between these two tribes and each of his parents is part of the warring tribes. So he's a vested interest in ending the civil war that's happening in his city. And they come back the next year during Khazraj and he comes back and the second time they were there, there were ten from one tribe, two from the other tribe. But what they agreed upon was essentially that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam would come and they would try to heal the issues that they had in their society. This is fundamentally what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam went to do in Medina and this is why the people of Medina over everyone else took him in. Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. In that first year, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam sends Musa'ab ibn Umayr as his ambassador to go be the person that is going to do da'wah, that's going to teach people about Islam, that's going to tell them what this new message is. And Musa'ab ibn Umayr was someone that he went to travel to Abyssinia, he migrated to Abyssinia so he had experience with different kinds of people, he was very eloquent, he was someone that was really, really good at what he did and he had memorized all of the Quran that had been revealed to that time, that point. And if you look at this pairing of Asa' ibn Zorar al-Dilan and Musa'ab ibn Umayr, Musa'ab ibn Umayr al-Dilan had all of the text and Asa' ibn Zorar had all of the context of Medina. Dr. Sherman Jackson talks about this in a really fascinating way where he talks about humanness. What is the essence of it to be human? But then when it comes to reality, there's no theoretical humanness that doesn't exist outside of an actual human being. And that actual human being is a particular. So how do you take the universal in the particular? So yes, we're talking about Islam and we're talking about Muslims and we're talking about community spaces. But for us to do that, we have to understand one the context of our community space and we all have the same text. So if we think about, and the reason I really love this pairing, Musa'ab ibn Umayr al-Dilan would go around and he's doing Dawah and Asa' ibn Zorar is like, this is so and so. Make sure like the stakes are high on this one. And Musa'ab ibn Umayr would talk to people and sometimes they come at a very combative like, what are you doing? They're in the middle of a civil war. Like these are not people that are like in a relaxed state. They're in a very tense state and he's there trying to heal them and trying to tell them, hey, if we follow this new way and we follow this new messenger, we can put down our arms and stop killing each other. And we can all live up to something that's bigger than all of us. So he is selling them something that is hopefully very very exciting for all of them. And Alhamdulillah they do and within that year a third of Medina becomes Muslim. This is before the Prophet ﷺ gets there. And when we think of the functions of the Masjid, we oftentimes think of the space. But reality is the Masjid is the people in the Masjid and not the actual physical walls. The Masjid is not the walls, the Masjid is the people inside of the walls of the Masjid. They come to the Masjid. Even now if we're far away and we're watching on a live stream, it's still the people that make up our Masjid community. It's still not just a physical space. Before the Prophet ﷺ made it to Medina, he had commanded Musa ibn Umayr to start Juma'ah. The very first Juma'ah that happened in the history of Islam, this is the biggest gathering we have in our Masjid, was led by Musa ibn Umayr in the house of Asad ibn Zura'ah. These people that had a civil war were willing to come to his house because they were all related to him one way or another. And Musa ibn Umayr was their teaching. And this happened about a year and a half to two years before the first physical Masjid in the history of Islam was built by Umayr ibn Yasir, and it was actually built in Quba, as the Prophet ﷺ is doing the migration. The reason I'm mentioning this, if something is hurting a member in our community, if someone came into the Masjid, took his ledge hammers, started taking out one of the walls, everyone would stop them. Right? Everyone would figure out a big wave, like get this ledge hammer out of this person's hand. They're hurting our Masjid. And yet somehow we see ills in our Masjid of like people that are backbiting, you took a ledge hammer to a member of our community. And yet we think twice before we stop someone from doing that. We witness racism in our Masjid, and we don't necessarily stop the person. May Allah never make us people that see lund, see oppression and just sit there idly by. May Allah protect us from that. But when we see these things, really try to imagine the people in the Masjid are far more important than the walls of the Masjid are ever going to be. SubhanAllah. So that's in terms of what I, like wallahu alam, what I think the Masjid is from our prophetic example, an example of the Prophet ﷺ. Now what is the context of America? And when we look at the history of Islam in America, the history of Islam in America started long before any of us got here. So when Trump was like, I'm going to ban the Muslims from coming, the biggest migration of Muslims to America was actually enslaved people. You're 400 years too late, dude. Also, you fundamentally dehumanized all of the Muslims that came before us. As believers, we don't do that to our own brothers and sisters. Even if the society dehumanized them, we don't do that because we're here as a response to their idol. And we were just talking how we, my husband and I lived in Cincinnati for 10 years. We don't have any family in Cincinnati. Like actually how we ended up there for like so long that I was like, you know, how did I end up here? And I remember there was a movie, I'm sure some of you have watched it, Prince Among Slaves. Who was a young man by the name of Abdul Rahman, who was enslaved, who spoke eight languages. He was a genius. He was so well educated. And he kept, he went through, like you watch the movie going through all of his trials and tribulations, and he swims across Ohio River, and he's in Cincinnati's Underground Railroad. And that's the first time he's free. And I remember watching that movie, and all of a sudden realizing we're all here because as soon as he got here, he made dua. It was the only reason any of us are here. And this is our legacy. Subhanallah, when I went to Sierra Leone, and I was telling the, I met the Sierra Leone Council of Imams, and I was telling them and I was like, yeah, you know, we're here because of their du'as. And they're like, oh, cute American who doesn't know anything. And they're like, that's not the first Muslim. The first Muslim was our king, Mansa Abu Bakr, alayhi rahmatullah, who is Mansa Musa's older brother. If you've never heard of Mansa Musa, he was the richest man that ever lived. He dropped off enough gold in Egypt and Sadaqa that he ruined Egypt's economy for 20 years, because gold didn't mean anything. Everybody had it. Subhanallah, his older brother traveled west and he landed in Brazil. And this is, the story is just so that I'm being, disclosing all of the information, this story is very much contested in academic circles where academic circles don't accept it. My two cents is because there were no white people to say that happened, and that's why they're saying it didn't happen. The West Africans know when their king traveled west. So I'm going to take their oral history, and I think their oral history is just as valid as any other history book that you could have possibly ever read. But the history of Islam in America, when we talk about like, oh, the majority of Muslims in America right now, I think it was 58% of them were born outside of America, 42% born in America. So even if we're the majority now, we never deny our history. We're here because of the Da'a of the people that came before us. Also, if it weren't for the civil rights movement, no Muslims, nobody would have been allowed, no immigrants would have been allowed for Muslim majority countries to begin with. So even just our presence here is still owed to that same struggle for liberation and for justice in this land, SubhanAllah, which actually brings me to my biggest point, Allah, SubhanAllah. The context of America is white supremacy. And the way that white supremacy works, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la defined it for us in the Quran as the pharaonic system, and Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la is describing the pharaonic system, and it's so dead on what you see in white supremacy. White supremacy is the colonization that brought the immigrants here to begin with. It's the anti-blackness. It's the enslavement. It is the colonization of this land. All of that is rooted in white supremacy. And when you study the pharaonic system in the Quran, it's so dead on similar to how white supremacy now functions. And Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la describes the pharaonic system in Surah Al-Qasas, and it's actually a very short ayah. And it's fascinating to me that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la saying this whole system, all they deserve is one ayah, because it's very... Yeah. It says, Pharaoh rose in the land, divided its people into groups. And here the word shia, separate from like shia or sunnah or any of that. The word shia in the Arabic language means a group with a distinct identity. So he divided people into groups and convinced them they were different. And then Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la continues in the ayah, it says, oppresses one of the groups. And ta'afa just means a subgroup from a larger group. So even in the ayah itself, it's implying that they're actually not very different from each other. They're just all human beings, and he divided them into groups. He oppresses one of the groups. And the way that his oppression is actually very gendered. He butchers their sons, and he keeps their women alive. I'm not going to finish that in case I screw it up, but like he is a horrible oppressor. But if you look at how America functions now, like even when I was studying like how many Muslims are here, I mentioned 42% were born in America, 38% were born and were migrated to America. But even when you look at that groups, the Muslims are actually the most ethnically diverse religious group in the country. And these are the divisions in the larger society when we talk about the different minority groups, they're supposed to compete with each other, so we can decide who's the best minority. Who gets to be the model minority? And what you end up doing is you're still competing against other groups of oppressed people to become less oppressed. Pharaoh didn't have to oppress all of the groups. He just picked one and kept his boot down so hard on this one group of people, to make sure that no one else revolted against him. And this is essentially how America works. And on occasion, America will kind of transition where they're like, oh, for a while, actually Hispanic people were considered white because we wanted to make blacks a bigger minority. And then after a while, they're like, oh, there's a lot of them. Hispanics are a new minority. And this is why even when you read a lot of the census, like it always asks for your ethnicity and then separately asks if you're Hispanic or not. Just some of the history of how America continued to divide people into groups. Now, Islam is telling us that who we are as human beings, our value is our dignity based on Allah, Allah created every human being dignified. Our value among each other is who has the most dacoit. So in the Quran, and we all, we love to recite this, like MLK, we had the MLK holiday like a week ago. We recite almost every MLK holiday. This is the, and you send a Muslim, this is the ayah they recite. We created you from a male and a female. Again, Allah swt bringing up the idea of gender. And we made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another. The benefit of all of us knowing each other, when I always introduced in non-Muslim spaces where people like, oh, we're the Muslims, I'm like we're the most ethnically diverse religious group in the country. Our potlucks are amazing. Everything else is hard because you have people from all over the world. But what an opportunity for us to actually heal these divides, to heal the white supremacy, first in our own institutions and then in the larger institutions. And Muslims can give this example to everyone around us of like, this is how we actually do it. Subhanallah. I just, my teacher Sheikh Ayyubullah Rahman, I don't want to go on for too long so I make sure that Brother Munir also gets an opportunity to share some of his thoughts. My teacher Sheikh Ayyubullah Rahman, he started 30 years ago in Cincinnati. He started an iftar, like, he didn't even, they didn't, him and his wife didn't actually intentionally be like, let's start an iftar program. Like, they were going to the Masjid. And as you do, they brought extra food for whoever was there that didn't have food. And they kept doing this, where every night during iftar, him and his wife would go to the Masjid, they'd eat, and then he would leave Terawir. And then after a while, some words started to spread that if you're hungry, go to the Masjid, there are people there that can offer you food. And it kept growing and growing and growing, so his wife started to call the other families and saying, hey, I can't make food for this many people every night in Ramadan. So then they started sharing it. This was 30 years ago. We have since, more than 30 years ago, the community in Cincinnati has since fed hundreds of people per night in iftar in Ramadan. I have more than one friend that walked into a Masjid one day at an iftar, looked at the diversity of everyone sitting in the iftar, looked around and said, wow, this is the dream that they were talking about. Takar Shahada became Muslim, joined the community. Poor thing, later realized that racism still sadly exists in the Masjid. Really, we have to work on that. We don't have to work on it. We have to end it. Like it just really needs to stop existing. That's the happier part. Well, I don't know if that was the happier part. When we look at our Muslim community, we lose one in three American-born Muslims. So if you're born Muslim in America, the chances of you continuing to be Muslim into adulthood is 67%. For converts, two out of three of them end up losing Islam. It's actually half. And a lot of the times, it's not about, it's a lack of community support. Quran is beautiful. The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is beautiful. The example is beautiful. But unless if we actually bring it to life, it's still going to continue to be theoretical. If you walk into the Masjid and someone loves you because the most important thing to them is la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulallah. And the most important thing to you is la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulallah. And that's the only reason you love each other and be like, ya Allah, I want to go to Jannah with this person. And you make da'a for each other. So fundamentally different than getting kicked out of a Masjid. Full disclosure, I've gotten kicked out of more Masjid than not. And if you're asking what I was doing, I promise I wasn't starting a fight. I was praying in a Masjid. A Masjid is a place to pray. And if I walk in and they're like, women can't pray here. There's no space for women. I'm like, yeah, but it's load time and I'm not going to miss Allah. You have to yell at me when I'm done because Allah is a Masjid. And alhamdulillah, like I feel like I, alhamdulillah, because I studied, I learned the hadith to respond of like the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, you cannot prevent the female servants of Allah from the houses of Allah. Like I don't understand the ambiguity in that statement that people are like, oh, I don't get it. It's so incredibly clear. And then you say things. I'm like, how could you tell me? I can't come to Juma and they're like, it's just fiqh. And I'm like, oh, really, the other command of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is not fiqh. How is one command fiqh and the other one not? You are not allowed to tell me I can't be in the Masjid. Also, the most consistent misconception about Muslims in America is actually not terrorism at all. It's the oppression of women. And every time I've shown them up in this space and they're like, Islam oppresses women. I'm like, my dude, they sent me. If we are serious about our Dawa, we would stop disenfranchising the women. We would make sure that the women are included, not just included, but are actually the leaders in our community. If you look at the most well-known Muslims in America right now, the vast majority of them are women. They're the ones that are rocking and shaking that are just like, hmm, we're just going to go live out our Islam unapologetically and we're just going to do this. I want to make sure I give brother and we need space for conversation and to make sure that even as we are discussing this, hopefully there will be plenty of time for discussion. I didn't come from a place of like, oh, I studied Islam, Alhamdulillah, and I give the talks. It's very weird for me to be on this side. Alhamdulillah, like my husband, I have worked in the community for years and years and years and years before I ever thought of going to study. Because in my mind, like Alhamdulillah, even the studying stuff fuels the service. It is still about how do we set up who's moving the chairs, who's moving the tables. And again, when we look at the example of the Prophet ﷺ, and I'm going to end on this, is when we think about building community, it's about valuing every single member in our community. It's not about kicking people out. It's not about deciding like, I know I said I was going to end on it. I'm not going to end on it. I'm going to share two more things. The Prophet ﷺ said, what if one of you had a stream of water in front of their house and bathed in it five times a day and they're like, you'd be the squeakiest, cleanest person ever. And he said, that's what Salah is. And the Masjid is the place where you do Salah. So for actually using Salah correctly, it's the Shaitan in the selling who's like, oh, you're too dirty. You might as well not shower. You're like, no, no, you're dirty. You shower. I'm like, if you have it, you come, you come, you pray. Who's this person that decided it was their job to gatekeep and decide if you're Muslim enough to come in, if you're clean enough to come in? We all have our issues. This is the place where we all come and we all pray together and we all heal each other. Subhanallah. There was a man that used to go to the Masjid of the Prophet ﷺ and he would show up drunk. This was after alcohol was prohibited. He would show up drunk to the Masjid of the Prophet ﷺ. I can't imagine that if a drunk person showed up to any of our Masjid that they would make it out safely. This person showed up to the Masjid of the Prophet ﷺ and I'm drunk. And he showed up regularly. And one of the other Sahaba, one of the times, he's like, look at this man so beholden to the alcohol. And the Prophet ﷺ looked at him and said, why are you supporting the Shaitaan against your brother? He's here because he loves the law and his Prophet ﷺ. When we have our struggles, our Masjid is our place to heal. If he's ever going to get his over his alcoholism, it should be in an alcoholics anonymous meeting in the Masjid. That's how we actually solve our issues. This is what I did want to end with. There was a woman that used to clean the Masjid at night. And the Prophet ﷺ, she passed away at night and they buried her and the Prophet ﷺ started looking for her. He's like, where is she? They said, oh, Ya Rasulullah, we buried her. She passed away and we buried her and he got so angry. He said, why didn't you tell me? And it was because someone else had decided that she was not important enough to tell the Prophet ﷺ. And he went and he prayed. He redid her janaaza because she is valuable. And if none of us see, Allah ﷻ sees. Allah knows. Nobody's word goes to nothing. And if you want to get something out of the Masjid, show up. Come to the Masjid. Let's change our statistics. If we had a failure rate this high in terms of the number of people leaving Islam, oh my God, we would have gotten fired from any job. I'm a college chaplain and usually people either becoming Muslim or leaving Islam usually happens in the college years and any time I show up to a community, I'm like, oh, you don't have a college chaplain. Only the future of like your kids, Islam depends on it. But sure, you don't have to. May Allah ﷻ continue to put Barakah in our Masjid. May Allah ﷻ make them all places of light. May Allah ﷻ fill our Masjid with love. The love of Allah ﷻ, the love of His Prophet ﷺ, may they all be lighthouses for everyone around us. So hopefully we all make it to jana together and then we all meet the Prophet ﷺ at his progress. And now Brother Munir will say lots of smart things, insha'Allah. Mash'Allah, mash'Allah. That was beautiful. So doctor, how do I follow up on that? So, Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. I wasn't actually there, I actually missed my left right here. So the name of my talk is creating the welcoming, inclusive, dynamic Masjid and my name is Munir Asafi. And I have had the privilege of managing the MCC Masjid for the past six years. And I'm just honored to see the growth of this organization. The MCC is still very much an experiment and by no means the welcoming, inclusive, dynamic Masjid that we all aspire for it to be. But I think for any organization, any Masjid, it's a journey of inches. And each day we try to be a little more incrementally closer to the goal. First of all, I just want to say I'm very privileged to be on the stage with Dr. Amina. You know, at MCC I'm often the man behind the scenes. You know, like Wizard of Oz, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I want to just run smooth forums and talks for great speakers like Dr. Amina just to operate. So the reason I'm up here, there's three-fold reason up there. First, I want to be her co-pilot. I'm just very honored to be up here because she is relatively new to the Bay Area. And I think this is her second talk at MCC and hopefully one of many, many, many more talks to come here in Shalom. Second, I believe in this topic, Masjid's Manor. And we know from the original prophetic Masjid, which was forging this early Islamic identity, it was this place at the intersection of intellectual and spiritual crossroads. Fourteen hundred years ago later, the Masjids in America today, Masjid still remained an oasis. It keeps the community together. It has to be strong. It has to be flourishing. I feel one reason Islam will survive after that critical third generation when other ethnic and religious communities who've come to America have either shed or relinquish their cultural and religious legacy will be this awesome milieu that we're living in. So it's going to be the Masjid that kind of help us out. Thirdly, kind of personally here, there's just a third dearth of a scarcity of information out there about operating a Masjid successfully in the West. It's sometimes really difficult to come by. My previous life I was a reporter and when I pivoted careers into nonprofit management six years ago, you know, I come from the Midwest and I'm the first Masjid operations manager I ever met myself. So I just didn't know where to turn when I got into this. So I went on to Amazon and I searched for Masjid management books. I didn't find anything. But what I did find was church management books written in the 1980s, 1990s. And ironically, when I read those books some of the churches were closer to the prophetic model in Medina than some of the Masjids I visited throughout my life and he'd been here in the Bay Area. But I'll get into that, inshallah. So first I just want to make a quick acknowledgement. Last year I had the privilege of attending Dr. Ahsan Bagby's talk about creating a welcome inclusive dynamic Masjid. This is one of those guys that if we had a Dr. Ahsan Bagby every of the nearly 2,800 mosques in America we have no issues as a community. So this evening I'd like to kind of synthesize what I learned and hopefully amplify his amazing talk which was very sparsely attended but just deserves to have a lot more coverage in the community. So let me tell you about Dr. Ahsan Bagby. He's researched Masjids for 30 years and he's put on three national US mosque surveys in 2000, 2010 and then recently in 2020. For the most recent survey we've just been learning about this tremendous, tremendous growth of the number of mosques. But with that we're seeing this quality over this need for quality over quantity and the sense of disillusionment that we're seeing with second generation American Muslims. They are seeing the mosque as calcifying because what we call a non-profit management the founder syndrome. It's when the uncles and aunties who as immigrants in the US may well bless them they establish the Masjid in Islamic center but it's kind of become their baby and they don't really allow that critical injection of new leadership and ideas and as a result those Muslim spaces are not relevant or you know in churches they call them unchurched and now in mosques we talk about youth and young professionals that are unmosked and we've heard this term anecdotally over years but now we have research to back up what's happening here because you know we see the eats here they're amazing but where are these people for the other 363 days of the years of the year so a quick tangent Alhamdulillah right now we build masjids and soon we're thinking about a second masjid and a third masjid because the space runs out and Juma is crowded Alhamdulillah but you know in interfaith circles when I talk with our colleagues of different faiths right now we're kind of the envy of the christian pastors and the jewish synagogue leaders when they hear about all the youth and the numbers that we have in the mosque but what they're saying on a national level is just weight because we've been where you have in this growth stage back in the 70s 80s as churches but now they're dwindling and so if we don't get our act together we'll be closely closing masjids in the coming decades like we're seeing with our religious peers happening currently so we're really at a critical time and there's still time to train the ships so to speak and have relevant masjids it's not a luxury anymore it's a necessity for the survival I feel of a strong proud Muslim identity in America so masjids why do masjids matter so if you're watching online right now or if you're here you're already part of the solution because you're a change maker we know mosques matter for one day the masjids connect Muslims to Allah and to one another as a community and masjids are the main institution that we're going to be using to pass on the Islamic legacy to generations to come but what are the challenges so according to research coming from national surveys here are the challenges that mosques are facing today many young adults women and comforts are dissatisfied with the mosques masjid leaders are complaining that there's a lack of volunteers and then lack of commitment from attendees at the masjid and then masjid attendees are complaining about a lack of unity a lack of sense of belonging when they come to the masjid and then a disconnect from the leadership so let's go back to the prophetic model we have a clear model what a masjid should look like the masjid when the Prophet saw some when he migrated to Medina that structure the edifice it was the center of Muslim life in Medina it was just not the place for five daily prayers it was a place for the sinner like we heard and the saint to go to so if you were hungry if you need money if you need food if you've fallen off the bad wagon and drank alcohol if you argued with your spouse and you need refuge Muslims knew at that time where to go and the masjid was that place to go for help for solace so where are we now let's just think about the masjid that was there when we think about all the words that came up this is the kind of words that I thought about clean trust worthy masjid this is the prophetic masjid there was good leadership it was welcoming brotherhood it was purpose driven sisterhood community no judgment loving peace helpful embracing mission-oriented social professional those are the words that we use to describe that not mosque or what I think of so today I just want to focus on three words welcoming inclusive dynamic those are the three words that I think that could really help us so first let's look at creating a welcoming masjid so that this according to the national surveys this is going to be the main draw for young people and young professionals this is page one stuff for masjids if your masjid doesn't get down being a welcoming masjid the writing is on the wall as far as I'm concerned for the relevance of that masjid in the coming years in the coming decades so again looking at the prophetic model Paul Salsam said you will not enter paradise until you believe and you will not believe until you love one another shall I show you something that if you do you will love one other and that's spread salam amongst yourselves so this is true brotherhood true sisterhood this is the cornerstone of every masjid brotherhood and sisterhood and one of the things I love love about the Muhammad Salsam's first statement when he entered Medina after suffering years of abuse his first words to the people of Medina spread salam feed the hungry maintain ties with your family pray at night when others are sleeping and when you look at that statement it's just spectacular because the first three things are all about your relationship with other people it's about connecting with humanity even before your personal connection with God it's your personal connection with other human beings so let's look at the research when focus groups were happening with ISPU which is a national organization here that's studying they put out this great research called remake in Muslim spaces and the focus group participants agreed that the most attractive aspect of a masjid for them is that sense that they're welcomed so this is one quote when I walk in I get smiles and salams this came from a young South Asian sister who fell in love with an inner city African-American masjid because because the person who greeted her at the door when she came in was warm and welcoming and you know who that person was it was a security guard that tells us how picky we have to be about the people who represent the masjid from the board president to the teen parking volunteer Ajuma each of these people might be the only Quran a person ever reads who steps forward in our masjid another quote this mosque gives me encouragement beneficial guidance and not just criticism this came from a young adult convert who was corrected in a brotherly fashion he was praying correctly and he was corrected in a brotherly fashion that shows a welcoming masjid so there are three items every masjid can do in my opinion and doctor a bad boy's opinion to be more welcoming so the first is to form a welcoming committee the second create a welcoming message and the third is create a welcoming culture so let's look at each of these briefly inshallah so the welcome squad they're called the the slim squad as well these are greeters that can represent every segment of the community in gender in ages and they stand at the door and give salam and assistance to anybody who comes for juma or comes for major events this could be the leader of the masjid and the leader of the masjid should really should be involved because we know the fish rot from the head it starts to the top there and the message has to start at the top the greeters so in the isp study when leaders of the masjid started greeting people as they entered for juma the next year the masjid squirts significantly higher in attendees feeling included listened to and valued the welcome committee can set up a table in the foyer or outside both of the entrances and they just strike up conversation after juma or before or after events and just get to know people they can give out onboarding guides they can give out welcome guides so new attendees will know that they're valued when they come inside there and then you know there's so much that happens at the masjid it's hard to get onboarded sometimes there's different services classes newsletters what's up groups the masjids usually have a lot to offer so the attendee the welcome committee can be that bridge there they can also ask attendees tell me about your interests what's your expertise and having to fill out contact forms and encourage involvement in events and committees you know I had visited this one amazing church here in castor valley subhanallah masha'Allah the welcome team there on every sunday is so strong that it's a competition amongst the sunday greeters to get the welcome card to the first-time visitor in the in their hand they will pretty much tackle you when they see a new face in the congregation just to get the contact card in your hand and then a few days later they call you or they email you saying how was your visit what can we do what can the church do to help you subhanallah the committee should also give special attention to those who might feel out of place so who could this be ethnic groups that don't represent represent the dominant ethnic groups in the masjid and the new converts those those are usually the groups so let's talk about creating a welcome message so we could ask the khatib to talk about being welcoming on being you know good brothers and good sisters to each other the masjids in the ispu study that we talked about they scored much higher on being welcoming after the khutbas that they had stressing brotherhood and sisterhood you could also place big signs at the entrance saying this is a masjid that's welcoming you can attack attack adopt a tagline and put that on every sign every welcome every newsletter every website at mcc we've been using this tagline for your finding faith in community so those are thoughts there okay so what what can we do to develop a welcoming culture so the practice of giving salam and a high handshake well before covid handshake so you could end the juma by encouraging the congregation to say salam to another so so you might say okay so the person to your right say salam to or or challenge the congregation before you leave after sunnah try to say salam to one person give a smile and say salam to one person that you don't know in the congregation another big thing about developing a welcome culture is to stop the haram police these are people maybe sometimes well-intentioned that that try to correct others or just criticize others and the congregation should know that there's one person they can go to who has the interpersonal capacity to correct things in a proper way this kind of emotionally intelligent brother and sister can kind of be that person in the community that will do that you know we all know this famous story of the bedwin and excuse me for saying this that urinated in the majjid and the sahaba you know they were ready to pounce on this person but the prophet of some stopped them and he explained in this very gingerly way the etiquette of the majjid and that shows the love the welcome and culture that he tried to make all right so the next word we're going to talk about is creating an inclusive majjid so let's look at that again at the prophetic model the prophet Muhammad Salsam said you see the believers in their mutual compassion love and empathy for one other like one body so from that let's look at some of the research so from national mosque research we learned that people feel included when they feel that their voices and their interests are being considered so if the leadership listens to people and improves the sense of belonging and then people that feel included when they feel faces when they see faces like themselves in attendance and in leadership positions so the young adult he'll say when I don't see faces like me I don't think I belong so having young people on the board ethnically divorce diverse people on the board and then of course it goes back on the bottom line of the majjid when people feel that they're welcome and included the greater likelihood that they'll donate and they'll volunteer to the masjid so a big one here is being inclusive to women so the women's faces very important and we heard about this from Dr. Aminam women's faces should be clean they should be comfortable they should be attractive and women should be serving on the the majjid boards and the committees and they should have the choice to pray either in the main masala or in a separate area and the messaging should be consistent in khutbahs and events and occasions women are cherished and welcomed at this majjid so um you know we get some pushback on this oh you know was the majjid the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam's majjid like this so isna mashaAllah in their infinite wisdom they work with the fiqh council of north america and many other islamic scholars and the statement they put out we call upon all majjids to ensure that that women have access to the main masala to perform sallah listen to the Jumu khutbah and attend or participate in lectures or discussions so with their scholarly backing to this the next critical cohort is being inclusive of young adults so finding a young adult champion to kind of lead the effort is so critical for the young adults so you organize listening sessions with young adults to hear their interests and their concerns and then you can facilitate young adults to form their own group and then support them in doing that young adults should be also young professionals should be present in leadership positions and the minbar so just being sensitive to young families and providing always provide babysitting for events so another thing we can talk about is the diversity on the majjid board majjid leadership should reflect the diversity of the majjid and the faces especially at the Jumu khutbah should also reflect that diversity just clear messaging that diversity is Islamic and it's valued in this majjid and making attendees know that the faces and the names of the leaders of the majjid and highlighting the diversity of that board is just critical so another thing that they talked about about majjids that are inclusive is the availability of leadership so the leaders, the imams they should be part of the theme squad part of the welcome squad to create those opportunities to listen to the attendees to have that pipeline so communication let's talk about that when being inclusive so posting the minutes of the board meetings posting the budget what are the elections what's the majjid budget going on these aspects are all part of the due diligence that we can do as much it's to be just really transparent and we can have e-newsletters we can be active on our website we can have facebook we can generate annual reports we can hold town hall meetings so much to do to have good strong communication with our congregation so let's talk about some means of building brotherhood so there are events you can put on so there could be a day where everybody wears a name tag and everyone greets one another with that name tag and that encourages one another to get to know one another there's cultural nights where one particular group in the congregation or culture their culture is highlighted family groups so this is when four or five families or individuals are kind of joined together as a unit and they meet once a month to socialize and kind of get to know each other the disabled this is something that's so important the majjid should be wheelchair wheelchair accessible the restrooms and the areas should be accessible and braille clients should be accessible or available in the prayer hall and then you can form a support group for the disabled and mentally challenged what I will mention is there's a great group in Chicago called mosin and you can reach out to them you can learn how to be more accommodating to the disabled in the community so creating the dynamic relevant to majjid let's talk about that now so we talked about being inclusive and now we'll talk about being welcoming being inclusive now being dynamic so the prophetic model oh you who believe shall I lead you to a bargain that will save you from the grievous punishment believe in Allah and this messenger and strive in the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives so the mission of our prophetic majjid was really this increasing and nurturing faith knowledge in the community so let's look at some of the research that's out there so young adults want a majjid that's relevant so the dynamic majjid presents relevant programming and offers numerous numerous opportunities to become involved so as a result the majjid feels alive it feels vital engaged exciting for them so people who want to volunteer are more likely to volunteer when they feel a sense of belonging this is one quote one quote that came from the ISB study they gave me extremely relevant hutbas so every time it seems that it's not some really abstract concept it's something that can be implemented another quote I appreciate the majjid so much because it engaged in the issues that I feel are important another quote there are so many ways to be involved so this is really what it comes down to whenever you want to be a majjid that's relevant and dynamic and welcoming you come down to these kind of quotes that you get back so developing and promoting a mission so when you have a clear understanding of the majjid's mission and when it's tied to the vision of Islam and the prophetic mosque and you're really focusing on the individual that's when you're making change there's ways you can do this you can conduct a strategic planning process to identify the majjid's missions and goals so another way is to be relevant so mosques must be inviting inspiring knowledgeable the speakers and khatibs who speak they must speak eloquently have the milieu of being living in America in 2022 in mind have powerful topics that are interest to the community whether they're spiritual or they're worldly and then the leaders of the majjid need to regularly evaluate the khatibs regularly evaluate the khutbas to make sure that they stay relevant and there's always a fresh message that doesn't go dormant from the minbar another thing that we can talk about for dynamic majjid's is appointing a volunteer coordinator so recruiting volunteers really really really requires personal contact when someone asks a person to volunteer it really comes has much more impact than it's just an email that's going out and when friends ask friends to volunteer that's the most effective way of getting volunteers so a volunteer coordinator takes information maybe collected from the welcome committee and then they contact the people and they offer them ways to become involved and volunteer so then another thing for an inclusive majjid is forming small groups so a large majjid like MCC for example a medium to the large majjid it's hard to get a sense of belonging because there's so many people here so forming smaller groups smaller clusters is another way of getting people involved and getting that sense of belonging identity interests from conversations and information forms and then facilitating a formation of small groups so forming small study groups of various segments of the congression you could be making cohorts of young mothers young adults people that are interested in environmentalism some that are interested in sports there's so many different ways that you can go with that so let's talk about some of the essential and necessary programs for every majjid so community service is key convert care supporting both the social and the educational aspects of the new muslim making the mosque more environmentally friendly creating a green majjid Dawah that was so critical reaching out to your community and educating them this could be having open houses interfaith program or intrafaith programs where you invite peers from the shia majjid the local shia majjid and having an intrafaith program so that's all I really have I'm not as polished ma'sha'Allah as Dr. Amina I just really want to extol some of the stuff that I've learned from church managing books for what I've learned from Dr. Esan Bagby who I consider a mentor for me as I'm trying to navigate this and I just kind of put it all into a blender and just try to put out there so I'm sorry if it wasn't as polished ma'sha'Allah as Dr. Amina but I really just hope that may Allah just bless the efforts of every person who's involved in the majjid I just find so much grounding in the majjid I grew up in the midwest and you know when I was growing up in Omaha where I grew up you know we would have we didn't have many events at our majjid but once a year we would have a fundraising event and we would have an out of time out of time speaker coming to our little majjid in Omaha it was either from Chicago and all the youth that were kind of involved in the majjid we were also excited leading into the fundraising event and this is a fundraising event it wasn't just a regular program for the majjid and we're like oh my god there's going to be an out of time speaker there's going to be food there it's going to be so great and that's all we got and then weeks after that event we would just be talking about oh my god wasn't it great that we had this kind of event so when you had this kind of dearth of Islamic programming over there when you see the majjid ma'sha'Allah here in the Bay Area and across California we have this critical mass of Muslims here so the youth of the community are just so lucky and just don't give it up for granted fight for your majjid be involved in your majjid that's really what it comes down to so I will say that Dr. Ahsan Bagby who I consider a mentor if you ever want to get a hold of him and do a presentation of your majjid he can do a two-hour, three-hour presentation to your board and this is his contact information everything I've said really it comes from him because I've been just kind of getting all his talks, his lectures because for so often in the past six years I've been looking at church managing books and now I see this crop of research coming from ISPU from ISNA and from Dr. Bagby and it's just for majjids it's so critical that we start getting into the research getting in there because anecdotally we can't just go off the hip anymore and running the majjid it's got to be research based and seeing what the best practices are so jazak lahir so if you have any questions inshallah a sister number is there and if you have questions for the live stream viewers if you want to put it in the chat we have somebody monitoring the questions as well and they can answer that inshallah because the Amerkran it's just hard for us to be putting on these events so what we're doing the best we can with the virtual so if you have any questions just raise your hand inshallah and the sister number can come to you do you have any part anything else you want to say based on some of the stuff I mentioned rockstar hamda lai of the honor of knowing him and his wife inshallah they're both community servants that have been doing it for years may all over reward them for all over their effort masjid bilal he was one of the founders of masjid bilal I think it I can't remember which city in Kentucky one is it louisville louisville well there's two big ones it's louisville or lexington so saying it's one of the l cities is not helpful at all Muhammad Ali alaihi rahmatullah he was in louisville and we remember going to his janeza subhanallah you think like subhanallah I don't want to if I talk about Muhammad Ali's janeza someone might start crying but I just like subhanallah like he was this person that was a picture of like physical health and he passed away and he's just our muslim brother that needs our draught now subhanallah but yeah back to masjid bilal masjid bilal is awesome so there's one from the youtube chat online najib azhar says how can a community survey serve to help offer relevant programs what are the programs you want to come to like some of the ones you mentioned like I remember subhanallah we had we used to do a monthly like community event of um and we would try to bring in like all the different because we were a very ethnically diverse masjid let's celebrate the ethnicities in the masjid like how cool is it to have like we had a soul food night and our black brothers and sisters came and shared about the history of islam in america we had a bosnian night and we had bosnian food and then we had our bosnian brothers and sisters singing in bosn like the like every muslim majority culture in the world has poetry praising the prophet lisa no so they came and they performed like that sounds like so much fun when i when we were on campus we did a malon around the world every night we had food from a different culture we're just celebrating the umma but what that does for people like I remember when when we would order a malaysian food all of the malaysian students were super excited they felt so welcomed so included when we were on campus we had three different black cultures we had um we had a senegalese night a somali night and a soul food night the black student or union on campus all of the black students muslim and non-muslim fasted all three days and came and prayed margaret with us because it was one of the few places on campus where black culture was just being celebrated without talking about like having to talk about the trauma that is the black experience in america when we like Dr. Rania recently published this article how the suicide rate in america and among american muslims is actually twice as twice the average we have a very real crisis in our community and like spiritual community is the message to give you the resilience because if you are struggling this is literally someone that loves you when we thought think of like salah is mandatory salah is far their commands in the quran where Allah swt tells us wa atasimu bihablillahi jamiaan hold on to the rope of Allah together us loving each other is a command from the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and command from Allah swt himself it's farad it's farad for us to like open our houses to people if you look at all the people that you've ever invited in your house and if they all look the same expand your circle because what you're saying is I only value the circle I don't actually value la ilaha illallah and anyone that says la ilaha illallah I only value the circle expand go meet people how hard is it to like also you get to eat fabulous food food is a theme in my life so I think the question about the community survey is so relevant because so often we're putting on events and we're not necessarily thinking about okay well is this what the community wants but I think it comes down to also when we think about what the community wants what about the ones that aren't coming to the masjid anymore we're talking about the unmask the youth that stop attending the masjid we're talking about the ones that have kind of perished because of some addiction that they have when we talk about can a masjid be progressive and strong enough to host a AA meeting when we have non-muslims come to the masjid and we're saying hey our community is strong enough to talk about this openly and not victimize ourselves anymore those are the kind of discussions that we can start doing at the masjid when so the disabled they're not coming to the masjid because they feel ostracized sometimes what are we doing to bring them in there so the community say well it will be great but usually you're kind of preaching to the choir you're kind of you're kind of talking to those ones that are already involved and they want to see more spiritual talks or something that's really relevant to your lives but what about the the kids that are are dealing with pornography addiction we're dealing with marijuana and they don't realize that this is not the marijuana that my of my mom's generation this is much stronger stuff where are they getting this information from if it's not the masjid that's that's constantly guiding them so it's got to be not just the survey where you just put out you just kind of sit back on your laurel something oh we put it out there it's got to be much more with your with your finger on the pulse of the community to know that there's people out there that are not going to come into the masjid how can we get them inside here to do it and maybe that comes down to being a third space maybe you need to kind of bring this out of the masjid just to get them back into the masjid absolutely I really we had an event called losing my religion and nobody got the song reference because they were all college kids which I'm still sad about it's an 80 song it's fabulous R.A.M. and there he's talking about how the spotlight is making him lose his religion I told the students or I'm like ask whatever you want anonymously and we'll sit down and we'll talk about it but just like it's a catchy title I was pushing the envelope on purpose of like hey come in the assumption of like oh if we never talk about this it never exists like if it honestly if you're not having a talk with your teenagers about islamic sexual ethics I promise they're learning it somewhere and it's probably not going to be islamic like if you actually want to go talk about it the prophet's lie said him didn't shy away from it he had very open conversations with the sahabah and they all learned how are we supposed to learn like the assumption of like oh like not the void is actually not just a void the void is negative you have to put in positive programming so that people actually learn their tradition in a way that's fun and joyous and funny instead of like boring and another thing is the khutba subhanallah when I've gone to masjid that the khutba is in farsi or arabic I was at this one masjid and they were all from south asian community the khutba was in arabic everybody's eyes was kind of glazing over there you have this 15-20 minute golden opportunity I honestly believe if the khutba is not relevant and doesn't catch the people like the khatib should be arrested or something like it should be very serious because you get only 15-20 minutes with them and you've got you've got you got it that so don't invite the khatib back you've got to be very picky because what comes from the minbar you're talking with them I always tell the staff here as well and I constantly remind them it's a privilege to be here at the masjid is such an honor to be able to answer that phone and deal with somebody who opens up about their problems about their kid who they feel has jinn issues going on but really you know in your mind there's some schizophrenia or something going on there and trying to do it because so often our community they're looking for this microwave answer I'm going to bring my kid to the masjid and just do a little on him and everything's going to be okay and it's it's a much more long process and you've got to sit down with them and say how are you how's your relationship with God how's your kid's relationship with God when was the last time you came to the masjid when was the last time you prayed you have these difficult conversations and that's what it comes down to it's very difficult work here but at the same time you realize that you are so fortunate to be here because Allah could put something somebody that can do this job better and that's why all the staff here they all know that they are might be the only Quran anybody ever reads and so if that's the case we've got to carry ourselves in the most up a becoming way that there could be so the the khutbas got to be there the staff has to be there the program has to be there and also having a pulse on the community has to be there I just have a couple of comments I think this will be a good topic for one of the khutbas maybe two three times you know so that people uh understand and maybe they can you know also get involved uh the other thing is uh I never see the leadership greet us around here I mean I know most of them but I never really see them greeting people or spending time with them so that uh are the leadership listening to this so what I'm what I was talking about is MCC is working to become a much that's more inclusive and these are some of the ideas that we're working on but the leadership MashaAllah they uh they work a lot behind the scenes and I think that might be that they're to their detriment that they don't put themselves out enough so I mean there's a need for that and that I think that we haven't yet started a welcoming committee here where we're actually doing intake as people come in here and that's probably been something that we just talked about talked about but there's so many balls up in the air sometimes that we kind of lose focus on some of the critical projects that we kind of put on the back burner but that's a great point that the leadership has to be involved you know at work I was involved in diversity part of the diversity council and that's one of the things I did you know greeting people talking to them all the time and people will be coming to me it's very important I agree MashaAllah and like the prophet I said them like actually taught us this like you smiling in your brother or your sister's face it's charity and if you close to the community greeting them having discussions with them you'll get a lot of ideas and volunteers so that's really very important the prophet was definitely a man of his people you know I was just the other day reading the hadiths about how you know it's a day of Eid and in Medina they were all kind of marching and it was a happy day everybody had their great clothes on also some MashaAllah he was with everybody but he was a man of great emotional intelligence you know we talk so much about IQ but you know modern studies are that the better emotional intelligence that you have it's better than IQ MashaAllah so he sees this little boy laying us kind of standing on the side of the road and he goes over to them and he says why aren't you joining the festival he says well my father was martyred and all the little kids have their their fathers that they're with on this joyous day and I don't have anybody so I don't want to be a downer I don't want to be going to them MashaAllah man of the people always kind of kept his pulse on on what's going on in society and he says I'll be your father from now on and the orphan became the envy of all the other boys because MashaAllah became his father so to speak you know he just was always a man of the people we know the famous story of the little boy who he added this nightingale is kulkul and you know the bird died and MashaAllah he came to him and he said in such a beautiful Arabic way oh father of Omer the bird's name was Omer like tell me what used to do with the bird and this boy just started opening up about you know the bird and what he liked to do with this and this was cathartic for him and he just let the boy talk about his his bird and so this is a man who constantly was with the people and around them and he was a leader at the same time like he was pretty much the mayor of Medina you might call him but he still made time for the people and we have so much to learn about his leadership skills so I said but also noticed who is missing he was looking sad what was happening and didn't feel like it was beneath him to go hang out with the child for an hour as he's telling him about his bird like SubhanAllah again like us loving each other and taking the time to sit with someone the difference between loving someone for the sake of Allah and and not having that relationship like I'm happy because you're happy like I'm genuinely happy and when you're sad I genuinely feel pain that's what loving someone for the sake of Allah SubhanAllah that it does and people can tell the difference between being loved and not loved we all can SubhanAllah I feel like if I'm walking in San Francisco and I see him on the side walking the road I will recognize him right away you know just the youth he was in my office the other day and he was talking about we're just talking about once I was on it and he's like you know if mama's person was here today what kind of car would he drive and you know where I'm engaged in conversation with them I was thinking about it later on I'm like he wouldn't need to drive a car at all like everybody would want to give him a ride but he probably drive something very you know a Corolla or a Prius or something I was going to say Honda Civic but Honda Civic there you go I mean we know the names of his animals like every animal he rode had a name that was like honored SubhanAllah yeah name your cars and the man had so much love I mean one of my favorite stories of him and I tell my daughters this all the time is you know and they love here in the story over and over again at night when we're going to bed at night time you know there was a mouse was was in a gathering and there was kind of this man that came to the gathering and he kind of tattered clothes on kind of a farmer and the man brought a gift from amongst us and it was like a bead of grapes and he gives us the process some and most of them like I said very emotionally intelligent and he sees that this man is very impressed with the prophet so he wants to impress him with his gift so he gives him the grapes and and and then Mohammed Salsam he starts eating the grapes and just telling him MashaAllah so so tasty so delicious so sweet and just starts eating them one by one with all his sahaba sitting around Mohammed Salsam had a habit every time he would get a gift he would share with everybody around him but this time he didn't share he ate all the grapes by himself and the farmer was ecstatic oh my god Mohammed Salsam loved my gift so much that he didn't share it with anybody else subhanAllah so he leaves happy and then one of the sahaba very very respectfully asked the process every time you get a gift you always share with the people around you why didn't you share the grapes Mohammed Salsam said the grapes were sour the farmer didn't know it but he gave him sour grapes and I was afraid that if I gave one of the grapes to to to you you know how you make a face when you eat something sour like a like a sour face I was afraid you'd do that and you'd hurt his feelings so that's why he ate him smiling and telling the farmer how much he loved him so many stories so many stories that this man you know I just wanted when we talk about the youth I was part of I were actually worked for a minute the Muslim youth of North America it's it's much bigger in the Midwest because you're the one Muslim family or the one of two Muslim families like MashaAllah did other a lot more Muslims here but they recent actually recently had a camp that was only an hour away from here MashaAllah the camp is completely organized by the youth they have advisors there's an adult setup we help them book the spaces and things like this but it's fundamentally run by the youth when you're like what are the fun programs that the youth want I don't know ask them they put it on they organize it and they have such a sense of pride after every single salah one of the cabins gives a khatira it's like five minutes but they're like teaching everyone else something they learned about the Prophet sallallahu and you hear them cheering for each other cheering each other on in their muslimness of like you gave the best five minute khatira ever until the next Allah and then they say the next person like you gave the best khatira ever it's so exciting and they're in the woods for a week it's so transformative when I youth is such a critical age subhanAllah when we tell you they're the future they're not they're the president if they're not in the masjid we've already lost like genuinely we've already lost the average age of the people in the battle of bed that was 25 years old when you look at some of the major sahaba that carried us now on their shoulders they became convert they converted when they were teenagers how many of us passed by a 14-year-old decided their opinions were not important enough may Allah protect us from that one of them can be said them to abu al-qas al-dallan said Nali al-dallan he was 10 many of us look at a 10-year-old be like what do you think prophet saallam did that this is literally our prophetic example to look at the 10-year-old and ask the 10-year-old what do you think and even his response like I think it's so fascinating like how well the prophet saallam treated him he told him about islam he's like but this is a big deal so you can't tell anyone he said okay I have to ask my father first he said let me think about it like I don't know what 10-year-old you've spoken to this like let me think on this it's important and then he's like let me go ask my father and then he went and came back and then he's like you came back you didn't ask your father and he said well I decided since Allah created me that I don't need to ask my father to worship Allah so I think I'm going to be Muslim and then I'll tell my father like it's such a phenomenal conversation and he's 10 years old al-dallan subhanallah and and when we talk to the youth like when I was at the minna camp I promise you some of the most challenging conversations I ever had were the minna camps because this is the first time like in your physical your physical emotional and psychological development that you're transitioning into adulthood an eight-year-old or a five-year-old might not be able to ask you where's Allah how do we know Allah exists a 14-year-old is transitioning into an adult and saying no I need to know how do I know Allah exists what does Allah want from me what is the purpose of life so we're having deep intense aqida conversations that I would never have in the like sometimes we have them in the masjid but they're so much more real and intense at these camps and you're watching a group of teenagers have their very first spiritual experience together it's so transformative their friends for life they discovered Allah together under the stars subhanallah and what it took a weekend a week in the woods but we have to create these spaces they created it for themselves this idea that they don't know what they're doing is just not true the youth these days subhanallah you know when I was growing up my parents were concerned I hope he doesn't be on christian or jew and leave Islam now the worry is to just leave Islam all together to just do it in this confusion that we have with post-monetism there's a hafiz in in the bay area here he had to talk three hours with one of the scholars here in the bay area I don't think there's a god anymore this is the hafiz quran the scholar is telling him subhanallah you have memorized this book and he's using verses that the young man has memorized to prove that there is a god the world that we're living right now another I just got a call recently a youth he doesn't say salam or anything brother manir is it okay if I listen to quran in the bathroom where does it where do you start with the sort of question what's going on well my family is very anti-religious and I the only place that I can find peace is in the bathroom so that's where I go to listen to quran well I was your family but anti-religious and where they come from there were some hardliners that messed up the faith of Islam so the family is now anti-religious anti-islam and so the young man wants to listen to quran and he can't do it but I like listening to quran that's great that you love listening to quran when I listen to quran the voices stop the voices stop when you stop listening to quran the boy is going through a schizophrenia breakdown I get on the phone with his mother his mother is in denial on this whole thing you know I need to there's a jinn in his body there's a jinn in his body no talk about schizophrenia no talk about a mental illness of the boy okay there's a jinn in the boy's body here's a sheikh that can help you they go to the sheikh the sheikh is like there's maybe some of that but this he's going he needs to see a psychiatrist he needs to be on medication right now our youth are suffering suffering it's it's very hard the they the issues that they're going through are just exponentially harder than what we went through right now so the masjid has to be the oasis for them there has to be something you know we give pizza out you know if you're talking about the food being this great thing we give pizza out because we want the youth to come directly from high school here they're hungry have some pizza before the drama begins and we do this you have to do whatever means necessary because these kids are being accosted from every direction from from and we're just seeing the good the ones that are at the masjid that are talking about these issues when they in this room we had a youth speaker come up how many of you have somebody give you pornography this week 80 percent how many of you have had somebody that's told you about drugs or try to offer you drugs this one 42 percent 50 percent of the hands went up so so the numbers are there we we share these numbers with the parents the parents are shocked oh my i have no idea it was this bad in the public schools we are in a very good area the reason we moved to this area is because of the schools it's happening all over the place i agree and then the other thing is if a muslim youth does try that does fall into it that's what doba's for like more than more i think the there was another study more than half of muslim youth tried alcohol and pre-medital sex within their first year of college and then their second year of college they come to me and they're like it wasn't as fun as i thought it would be and i'm like no it's really not let's talk about it also this notion that like oh i've committed a sin that i can never come back what sin do you think could possibly be anywhere near the mercy of allah there's nothing just come back anything you've done i promise it's not as bad as you even think it is just do your toba and come back let's have the conversation can i say something about the women i really feel like i need to plug the women i just there's so many women muslim women that are leaving traditionalism because they're being told junk about it they're being told so much junk and it's just like and dr amon talks about this he says that the shaitan doesn't have any of his own light so what he does it's like shadow puppets where he tries to make something appear that it's not almost every muslim i've been to and they're like this is the rights of your husband the wife has rights too there are an equal number of a hadith but if you present half the story what are you doing you're misrepresenting the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam there's so many women that are leaving traditionalism because they know when they're being lied to and we're insulting their intelligence and telling them no no you can't be here you can't speak in the masjid how many examples of women speaking in the masjid of the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam not just speaking taking political authority in the masjid of the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam after the conquest of mecca the only like everyone in mecca was safe except for a short less than 10 war criminals one of them walked into the house of umhana radiallahu anha and she said i am giving him protection she gave protection to a war criminal and the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam affirmed her and said we give protection to the person you gave protection to you don't have to be the strongest person because before if you have armor if you have men in your family then you have power and a woman inherently doesn't have power and now the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam saying this woman has power to say i'm protecting a war criminal we're gonna have a conversation with him and the fights that happened like i remember we had another scholar came in sit and our masjid kept like arguing over halal meat he's like the whole point of halal is honoring the animal you're about to kill and eat you're really gonna disrespect your mother or sister over like that makes no sense accommodate each other be kind to each other these are actual parts of our religions panallah i just i'm actually when i see women that have stuck it out like i don't know about anyone like i don't know how many have you ever been kicked out of a masjid i hope not i don't i usually ask this in a crowd and then i'm like how many people have been kicked out of a masjid without fail the majority of the women and the majority of the black people raise their hands i had one guy he was like a young man and he was like young brown man to be stereotypical and then he raised his hand to him like no way why what happened and i'm like i'm sorry i didn't mean to get this happy and then like i was just so shocked and then he's like oh my shorts were too short and i was like oh yeah they do that too like you're you're yelling at the person that's in the masjid the vast majority of them didn't come to the masjid so where are you yelling at the people in the masjid they're actually doing it right they're here and for each one of those experiences if we overwhelm people with love i think statistically it's like nine positive experiences for every one negative experience i don't know if we can get rid of every single recess that can ever show up to the masjid but if every single black person that walked through the masjid had at least nine other people they could point to for every one idiot that said something that was racist they would still feel like they belonged at the masjid they would recognize that that person's wrong and it becomes everybody's responsibility to correct that person it's not their job it's everybody's job to do it i know i ranted it's uh rants are good so i think you know we talked about the mercy of Allah mashallah there is one youth that came what is a soul what is a soul he this is a youth after the khutbah comes to one of the scholars what is a soul he didn't know that there's a soul inside of him and this body is a mechanism that we're using a vehicle that we're using and the soul will be going on after this there we just need to go to the basics with some of these youth subhanAllah i remember as a youth sitting at the masjid i didn't know about the mercy of Allah till i got to high school probably i knew god as this angry uncle who was waiting waiting to cut me down until i did something wrong i remember thinking i was probably 13 or 14 and thinking oh man i'm going to hell anyway because hadam was being used all the time for everything you're not listening to your parents hadam and you're you're heard at home heard at the masjid i'm not going to hell anyway i might as well just live it up and and and i remember having this thought and may Allah bless them i don't know who it was but i remember there was a speaker that came from out of town from okul homa and he came to our masjid and he talked about Allah's mercy and and my jaw dropped i remember that khutbah i was probably 15 or 16 sitting there that's why i think the khutbahs are so important that they have to be relevant i'm like Allah's mercy Allah loves me i didn't know he loves me having this opinion in me at that age and that's why it's so critical the mercy of Allah just needs to be taught over and over again because the some of the youth do not know that Allah is merciful they know him that's been weaponized for what it is and you know the mercy of Allah that forgives shirk there's a man who made a little idol and he didn't name it Allah but he named it something similar to Allah every day a hundred times he would say that name the idol over and over again and then one day his tongue slipped and he accidentally called Allah's name Allah came running the angel said Allah he said your name by accident he was he was saying the name of his his idol you don't understand Allah said to his angels if this person just one time had called on me in a genuine way i would have forgiven all that and that's shirk that's up here what have we done that's so bad and you tell these youth this and they would tell me tell me more about Allah's mercy and you tell them about oh there's a man and his bad deeds will be good more than his good deeds and Allah will tell him to go to heaven and the man will be confused and say what my bad deeds are more than my good deeds why am i going to heaven Allah will remind the man there is one day that you're on earth and you're in bed and you had trouble falling asleep so you were tossing and turning and out of frustration you said Allah and then you turn to the other side and you fell asleep and you forgot about that night but your lord he never sleeps he never forgets and because of that one Allah you have heaven it's one good detail to God's liking i was just uh two days ago i was talking with a new Muslim and i was just telling anecdote anecdote he was like a child he's a 30 year old man tell me one more tell me one more people are thirsting for this faith just thirsting for this faith and we're holding it back like it's a treasure that if we give it away well it'll be lesser than us it just increases and that's why the masjids have to be that that spot and i i tell the story again and again about how my life changed while i was sitting in masjid where i decided oh this is what i want to do with my life because i heard about the mercy of Allah bless our masjids and help us all we're coming up on isha time so my love bless everybody who's tuned in and and joined us here my love bless doctor i mean i'm for your insights and like no really may all reward everyone that has ever put an ounce of energy towards a masjid may Allah accept it from them may Allah give them a hundred misadjins and jannah homes and jannah fort every second that they put in span Allah again when we think of the masjid we always are like oh honor the legacy of the masjid who donated no who put in blood sweat and tears i didn't like our moment we were grad students i didn't have money to donate i choked on the fundraiser i just thought it was hilarious it's like i don't know why i'm here i put in at least i put on like 20 hours a week there was actually a moment where i was like maybe i should quit the phd program i'm in the masjid more than the phd program my parents were not happy with that decision but i'm done please come hang out with us once coveted