 To commence, I counsel you to be wary of Allah for the best that we can advise each other to is Taqwa. Qalallahu ta'ala fi muhqami tanzeeli wa sannajiz shakirin. Allah tells us in the Quran, we shall in the near future reward the grateful. And if we look at the word shukr linguistically, it isn't quite thankfulness. It does mean thankfulness, but its original usage in the language was actually with livestock. Particularly with a camel. You would say ibnun shakur, a camel that gets fat on a very little bit of grass. Because that's the type of camel that you want. It eats little, gets fat, provides you a lot of milk. And it's from this meaning that we have one of Allah's names, a shakur. Not the thankful, again, God is not the thankful, but he is the one that gives a lot of reward for very little action. In the same manner that a camel who eats very little might get, might give us a lot. So Allah's shakur perhaps might be better translated as the appreciative. The one who appreciates what we do, who increases what we do by giving us back and reward many fold. Allah says, or the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, Good deeds are given tenfold reward, up to seven hundred times and many multiples more. And therefore we cannot belittle even the smallest thing. Even the slightest action that we do, because even smiling at a fellow Muslim can bring us untold rewards. And this extends to our acts of recitation. We get reward for every letter that we recite of the Qur'an, not every word, but every single letter that is in the Qur'an. Whether we understand it or not, whether we are totally mindful while we are reading or not. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, Whoever reads a letter from the book of Allah gets a good deed. Well, it has sent to be tenfold. And each good deed is multiplied tenfold. And I am not saying that alif, lam, meem is one letter. But rather, alif by itself is one letter. And lam by itself is one letter. And meem by itself is one letter. This is Allah, as shakur. And we are told to be like Allah. So there are only two ways that we can be. We can either be shakur, grateful, or we can be kafur. Ingrates, the very same root in Arabic that we use for kufr, for disbelief. And these two concepts, gratitude and belief cannot be stripped from each other. Allah says, What will Allah do with your punishment? In other words, this is a rhetorical question. So Allah is saying, God will not punish you. If you are grateful and believe. So as we said, gratitude and belief cannot be torn apart. Gratitude with belief or without belief is not gratitude. And belief without gratitude is just some poor imitation of what faith is. And that is because belief is the acknowledgement of Allah, the one from whom all blessings come. And meanwhile, gratitude is to thank the giver of a blessing for those blessings. And so if we try to thank someone else, and we don't recognize that the true source of our blessings is Allah, we have not given thanks. We have not been grateful. But on the other hand, if we believe in Allah, but we don't give thanks, then we don't truly believe that it is Allah that is giving us anything. And our belief is weak. And so a true, deep belief in Allah necessitates that we recognize and give thanks to Allah for what he has done. And this is why ingratitude and disbelief are the greatest of moral sins. Disbelief is to refuse to acknowledge the one that has given you everything. And so when we look back at human morality and our conversations within philosophy and ethics, what is the greatest moral crime? It's not cheating someone. It's not being racist. It's not being a traitor. Probably most people would agree it's murder. But not all murder is equal. Some murders are worse than other murders. The murder of your own family is a greater moral sin than other murders. And most specifically, the murder of your own parents is the worst of murder. And you can say the same thing for every single evil. The very worst of cheating someone is to cheat your family, most specifically to cheat your parents. The very worst of betrayal is to betray your own parents. And in any traditional culture, in any place which had a grounded morality, to do such a thing is unimaginable. When the Prophet ﷺ told his companions, إِنَّ مِنْ أَكْبَرُ الْكَبَأِرْ أَنْ يَلْعَنَا رَجْلُ الْوَالِيْدَيْ One of the greatest of sins, one of the worst of sins that a person can commit is to curse his parents. The Sahaba responded, they asked, they were bewildered. What key for يَلْعَنَا رَجْلُ الْوَالِيْدَيْ? How could a person curse his own parents? Because they cannot understand how a person could be so ungrateful to their own parents, to the people that carried them, that provided for them, that cared for them, that raised them. And so the Prophet ﷺ explained, يَسُبْبَ أَرَجْلُ الْوَالِيْدَيْ فَيَسُبْبَ أَبَأْهُ وَيَسُبْبَ أُمَّا A person will curse another person's father. And so that person will in turn curse his father and his mother. But the point here is that this greatest of moral evils is to raise your hand against those people that have given you everything. And if that is the case, then we must ask ourselves, what then is the moral evil of rejecting Allah? Of taking all of these infinite blessings that He has given us and then turning away in complete ingratitude. And it is true that the greatest form of that ingratitude is disbelief. We are all here believers, but a Muslim can be ungrateful despite his belief and that puts us in enormous danger. There's a famous hadith of a man who lived 500 years on an island and he committed no sins during his entire life. And we are told that on the day of judgment he will be brought forth and Allah will ask him whether he wishes to be judged in accordance with Allah's mercy or in accordance with his own good works. And this man, he knows he has 500 years of dust, pure devotion and worship. And so he chooses to be judged in accordance with his own works. And so Allah agrees and those 500 years are placed on one side of balance. And Allah places one blessing, the blessing of eyesight on the other side and the blessing of eyesight weighs as if those 500 years are not there at all. And so this man, he begins to be dragged towards hell and he cries out, he cries back to Allah, he says, no, by your mercy. And Allah hears him and he laughs and he tells the angels to take him to paradise. If you were to estimate a single of God's blessings you would not be able to enumerate it. A single blessing of Allah is immeasurable. Just think the blessing of your tongue. With that tongue you are able to eat, you're able to swallow, you're able to taste. And each of those things has a thousand blessings that come with it. With your tongue you were able to speak and you were able to communicate. And so if that tongue were taken away imagine the difficulty that you would be in. Unable to speak to people, unable to express your own thoughts, unable to taste food, unable to really eat. Perhaps you would be stuck in a bed with some pipe attached to your stomach and that's all you could ever do. And that is why a single blessing is uncountable, is immeasurable. And while it is in gratitude, not acknowledging these blessings that leads us to hell, it is gratitude more so than anything else that guarantees a safety from hell. And we know this because in every single thing that Allah has promised us that is beneficial for us, that he told us that he would give us a great exception. So for example, he says Allah will enrich you from his bounty if he wills. And Allah says Allah will lift away what you ask, the difficulties that you complain about if he wills. And Allah says He will provide without account to whomever he wills. And he says He will forgive everything else, everything other than disbelief if he wills. And Allah says And he will accept the repentance but only of whomever he wills. And so Allah is telling us that all of these things and these blessings that come with belief come with being practising. Allah can choose not to do it. He can choose to make us the exception. He can choose to test us and to punish us and to not forgive us. But that does not apply to thankfulness. As we said earlier, Allah says Allah will not punish you if you are grateful and believe. There are no exceptions here. This is an unconditional promise. And Allah also says If you are grateful, surely I will increase you. And there is no exception here either. This is also an unconditional guarantee from Allah. Be grateful and he will not be punished. Be grateful and he will be increased. But Allah continues and he says If you are ungrateful, you should know that my punishment is severe. And so we have two types of people. The grateful, the shakr, who gives thanks to people and gives thanks to Allah even the smallest and most insignificant of things. And we have the kathur, the ingrate who refuses to give thanks because of some strange entitlement or arrogance or ignorance. And no one in this country who is at this mosque here really has any right to be ungrateful. Look at our blessings. The very fact that we can be here in a masjid for Muslims in America without an iota of fear within us as Muslims who believe in God is a blessing beyond all blessings. There are people in China right now. Muslims in China who are being forced to recount their belief in Allah. There are people in Palestine cowering before bombs from the sky. There's war and there's famines and there are floods and there are earthquakes all around the world. People go their entire lives just being angry at Allah and not believing in him. And so we started this khutba and we start every khutba by saying, Praise be to God who guided us to this, who guided us to faith, to belief, to safety, to choosing to be here today. These are all blessings and they are blessings we often take little notice of and we must take great notice of. Having said this, I ask for Allah's forgiveness. We are at the end of the year and this is a time that we should use to review our past year to look back and evaluate what we did and how we did just as you would evaluate yourself in some business. And among those things that we do at the end of the year is to offer gratitude for all the blessings that we have come to know in the past year. And perhaps some of us have suffered a lot. Perhaps some of us lost loved ones and suffered from illnesses and lost their jobs or became addicted to some sort of drug or committed some grave sin that we can't seem to forgive ourselves for. And so some of us might ask what is there to be grateful for? But we should stop and we should remember that Allah has full right to make our lives worse. He could have taken more people. He could have removed their faith before taking them. He could have removed your faith because he took them or because of something that you suffered. But you are still alive and you still have faith and you are still in this country and you are attending a khutba in a mosque as well equipped as this one. And really we should be asking the opposite what is there not to be grateful for? Allah describes the archetype of ingratitude in the Quran. He says Leave me alone with the one that I created alone. And make no mistake this will be our end. Each of us will face this on the day of judgment one on one with Allah. There is no hiding on that day and there is no fighting on that day. There is no getting past Allah. Your soul will be laid before him and this will be our end. And Allah continues and he says We have given him expansive wealth His wealth allows him to go places to reach people He can walk out and look to his left and look to his right and look straight forward and everything he sees he can go to and is his. And Allah continues he says We have given him children who are present who don't have to go out and work but can always be at his back and support him and this came down in a tribal context and the sons were the people that backed up their fathers. So think here about yourselves and the people that would support you the people that would speak up for you if you got into trouble. And Allah continues He says We set out everything smoothly for him everything was easy for him and really think about how easy our lives are and then what? And then what is this person's response? Allah tells us Then he wants that I give him more He wants even more he is not satisfied and this is our world we live in a world that demands that we be unsatisfied that we want more and that we take more but as we have already learned Allah has already told us how to do this If you are grateful I will increase you the very thing that that ingrate that Allah tells us asks for if you want that if you want more Allah tells us be grateful and gratitude is to use what you have been given whatever that is in a way that pleases Allah if it is a little bit you are satisfied with it and you use it and if it is a lot you are also satisfied with it and you use it and you give away what you don't need and if you are given tribulation then you can thank Allah for the blessings within that tribulation the fact that it was not so bad the fact that it takes away from punishment later the fact that it did not affect your face that you could still be grateful for it but to do these things we need to do two things we must first remember what our blessings are and second we must know who it is that these blessings are coming from the first is straight forward to remember our blessings to set some time aside each day every morning and recall some blessings perhaps you might want to write them down perhaps it is just recalling them to your mind perhaps you have them present in your mind perform such a tashukah a prostration of thankfulness but second and just as importantly we have to take time to get to know Allah to get to know the one who is giving us these blessings there is a famous story of one of our scholars Abou Ahmad al-Fassi a scholar who lived in Tehran in Tunisia and the people in that time they were debating an issue or do disbelievers do they know Allah do they know God and so they were debating it and they could not reach a conclusion amongst themselves so they went to the scholar Abou Ahmad al-Fassi and he said think about this and he pointed to one person in the crowd and he said if you meet a man and you ask him do you know Abou Ahmad al-Fassi and this person says yes I know him describing to me and he says Abou Ahmad al-Fassi is a business man he sells herbs, he sells weeds and he lives in Egypt does he know me and the person in the crowd said of course not and so Abou Ahmad al-Fassi continued he said and then if you go up to another man and you ask him the same question and he responds he is a man who teaches Islam and he gives fatwa and he asks does that man know me and the person said yes this person does know you so the first person did not know him but the second person did and this is the way a disbeliever is he thinks he knows God but he does not and so he is worshiping some idea in his mind that has those same characteristics but that is not limited to the disbeliever if we do not know Allah as he describes himself in the Quran if we do not know Allah as the prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam describes him in the hadith if we do not know Allah as our scholars have explained in our books then we do not know Allah and we are not really giving our thanks to him but really to some other idea that we have in our head and so this is the second thing that we must do first as we said take time to recall your blessings but second take time to know Allah study the names of Allah read books on them attend classes on them strive to understand Allah and if we understand Allah better we will only come to appreciate him more and therefore we will be increased we ask Allah to grace us with that which he loves and is pleased with may Allah send prayers and peace upon our prophet Muhammad and may he be pleased with our masters as well as their mother the rest of the companions and those that follow them in goodness until the day of reckoning and we ask that Allah be pleased with us as well out of his vast mercy Allah we ask Allah to give us refuge with him from the punishment of the fire the torment of the grave the trials of life and death and from the evil tribulation of the dajjar the antichrist and then Allah says Allah commands to justice excellence and charity to relatives and he forbids indecency vice and injustice he warns you so that you may take heed welcome