 This question here reads, some of the women that were mentioned today as examples can be viewed as anomalies. Okay, I love this, because as soon as I read it, I was like, ah, I knew somebody was gonna ask this. I knew somebody was going to say, oh yeah, yeah, I know, but those are the greats. Does this actually apply to me? So the question goes, or that they were women who were present in the time of the Prophet, so l'Allah wa'ala, he was sending them, which is also a very common thing that people say. But they were sahabi'at. Who are we? Okay, hang on. And we are not debating that they are the best of generations. This is clear from the hadith. However, or, I'm gonna continue, or they were sahabi'at, yes, okay, you got that. Or they were so special and better than us, that they are at a different level that we will never reach. How do we talk about this? I'll tell you exactly how we talk about this. The reason we decided in this, or at least in my talk, I decided to bring examples of the Prophet's wife and examples of the sahabi'at was specifically because the topic itself had to do with the concept of, my topic was stay at home. Do women, shouldn't women stay at home? And I was giving examples because people are going to say, is there proof in the Prophet's era that women did more than stay at home? I said, well, who better than the very woman of the Prophet's era, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, and his very wives, Redwan and Lahi Alaih, to actually explain. But that does not mean that in all of Muslim history, that there weren't so many examples, sisters, you have to hear these stories and understand that there were so many of them, you ubiquitous, to where these are not anomalies. They are not. And I'll tell you, and this is why I'm so happy to say that, because anytime I get to share about Damascus, I love it, the show. Because for me, for me, I had the honor of being able to see this in real life. People who are present, I don't know who was in the Holocaust on Friday night a couple weeks ago, I got so frustrated, it's fine, I want the sisters, but with the questions that people ask about, where are the female scholars? And I would explain and explain. And finally, I just said, you know what, I turned off my green screen behind me and there was my bookshelf, right? And I just pointed at my bookshelf and I said, you see these shelves over here? You see these shelves behind me? There were rows and rows and rows of books. And I said, every single one of these is a modern, currently living, or just recently deceased, female scholar. You want fiqh, you want hadith, you want the qira'at of Qur'an, you want tajwid, you want sida, you want it to everything. It's all right there on the shelf and they were all wanting to have Damascus in one place, one country. I think we added to it all the countries of the world. Fatabarak Allah, what you said was so true, we may not know the women scholars because sometimes the auntie who is in the community who you learn structural racism from and nobody calls her a doctor, ustada, blah, blah, with honorific titles. But she has more knowledge on that topic than anyone else, right? And then what about all of our teachers that actually have knowledge and either we don't know them, simply the gems, the gems of our community or they don't have a platform, which is what Rahmah Foundation is a platform from all the women ustadas to speak from. They don't have a whole organization backing them, our masajid opening their doors to them. Or that simply we are so used to just like the question about the Qur'an apps and listening to men who read Qur'an, beautiful recitations, we're so accustomed to listening to a man reciting Qur'an. We've never even heard a woman recite Qur'an. Subhanallah, right? And so let me just tell you this. These are not anomalies. Back to the question. What I saw, Subhanallah, was a beautiful story of balance. A story of women who had, if Allah blessed them with a spouse, were married. And from those who were married up, Allah blessed them with children were mothers. But every single one of them without exception, whether she was a wife or not, whether she was with or divorced, whether she was single or never married, whether she had children, 10 of them were one. They had one thing in common always. They were dedicated to the knowledge of Islam. They learned their Islam. These women, it doesn't matter. The primary level was they all memorized the Qur'an. Every single last one of them had Ijaz and Qur'an. And then there are those who went further up and memorized a hadith. And eventually got Ijaz as in all the books of hadith. And those who became the 10 Na'shar Qura'at of Qur'an. Right, and on and on and on, Subhanallah. And we're not talking in the ones or 10, 20s or 30s anomalies. We're talking in the hundreds. It was a whole movement. It was beautiful. It still is. These are currently living people, though they may not all be in Damascus today. Make Dua for Syria and all of the countries of the Muslim world and the world by extension. The reason I'm sharing this with you sisters is because we tend to think of anomalies. Let me tell you, after I came back from studying Syria, one of the trips back, I had actually spent so much time studying with women teachers. And at a young age, I was a teenager when I first started. I went to my first mixed, yeah I mean mixed as in like a woman where on one side and then around the other side, program. It was a month long intensive dean program. And I was like, huh, this is interesting. There were all male teachers. Actually quite a funny story. There were all male teachers. There wasn't a single woman teacher. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, I'd never really heard too many male teachers speak, whatever. So each one was getting up and giving his lecture. And after like a day's worth of this, this shows you how naive and kind of silly. I was still very young. I'm sitting in the front row. The problem is I'm sitting in the front row. And I listened to each of them, each of them, each of them. Okay, we have a whole day worth of male teachers speaking. Beautiful teachers, masha'Allah. And finally I turned around to the sister sitting on this side of me and sister sitting on this side. And I said, huh, how strange. They're all men. And I said, you know, they're not so bad. They're just not as good as the woman teachers. And the sister sitting next to me, well, we'll not forget the look on their faces. They looked at me like, what planet did you just come off of? That you know more woman teachers and scholars that is the weird anomaly that the male ones are speaking. And that was my reality. All of the women were teachers. All the teachers that we had were women, subhanallah, scholars, scholars. Alhamdulillah, Allah allowed me to keep going back to Damascus. I did study with the men and the sheikhs of all of Damascus, beautiful, masha'Allah. But something special about that, to where you can take a young kid and put her in a program and go, huh, strange male teachers, masha'Allah, right? I had a friend, very similar, sorry, tangent here. But she had lived all her life overseas and so her hockey team was all women, all girls in the Muslim country. When she moved to Canada, they went to their first official hockey game. And so when you have the mask on and everyone's playing, you can't see if they're a male or a woman. And then they're a woman. And so eventually it took their helmets off and she goes, oh, they're men. Exact same reaction. It depends what you saw. It depends what you grew up with. It depends what you were able, Allah gave you the ability to see. Sisters, these examples are not anomalies. They're more ubiquitous than we think and they absolutely can and should and will be you and your daughters, inshallah ta'ala.