 It is a pillar of the two sermons to remind the believers on this blessed day of Yuma of the importance of taqwa. Taqwa which is the wasiyah of our Lord Subhanahu wa Ta'ala that is the counsel that He gave to the ancients that He gives to the people that come towards the end of time i.e. all people. And we know that ultimately the aqiba, the ultimate outcome is for the people of taqwa. Nothing is more important for us to acquire and obtain why we are here on the face of this earth than taqwa of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. And as we move up in the various degrees of taqwa we will realize that the secret of drawing near to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala lies in belief in Him Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and increasing in those very degrees of taqwa. And as our Lord says Subhanahu wa Ta'ala Indeed the awliya of Allah His friends, His saints, the real truly righteous people that He has accepted and validated who are these blessed people and what are their traits and what do they experience? Allah Ta'ala describes them as that not having fear nor any type of grief. They don't have any type of fear la khufa alihim walahum yahzoon nor do they have grief. And this relates to the way that you and I normally deal with the with the future and the past. But what are the traits of these blessed people? They are the people that believe and they have taqwa And this beautiful way of phrasing it in Allah Ta'ala's book and of course so we know that every single letter in Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala's book is perfectly placed. They used to be people of taqwa not just in one particular instance and everything that it is that they did and every situation that they found themselves in they were people of taqwa and then as a result they received a fruit from being like that They will receive glad tidings here while they are still on earth They will be blessed in dunya but not just limited to here and also that in the hereafter that is the supreme in great triumph this is what we want to be like this is what we want to strive towards and on a blessed day of Juma like this this is what we need to remind ourselves of I wanted to share for the time that we have together today with something very beautiful that Imam al-Azali says about the great imams of this religion and to very briefly paint the context of what it is that he says Imam al-Azali noticed a certain tendency in his time a particular tendency but even though this particular tendency was that specific to his time and what he saw that same tendency exists before him and even after him but then it's also applicable to anyone in any time by way of general applicability and specifically he was calling out the formalistic tendencies of the scholars of his time where he noticed a trend in some of the scholars of his time or the language that he used indicates a large number of scholars of his time he noticed that they were focusing too much on the outward dimension of knowledge and it was leading to various diseases of the heart which would then take someone from through practice of the religion and so one of the things that he does in the very first book of the 40 books of the Ihriyah which can be seen as volumes he wants to give us all a correct conception of knowledge how it is that we understand knowledge and what is the most important type of knowledge that you and I need coins a term which is called el tarik al-akhira and he's the first one to use this term and since then people have been using it for over 900 years this term el tarik al-akhira is composed of three words and of course is knowledge but because this type of knowledge is a part of a system it's systematized it's better translated here as the science of the tarik the way to the hereafter the science of the way to the hereafter or you can even say the science of the path to the hereafter and he wanted people to know that this is the essential conception of not only knowledge but of the religion of the Salat al-Saleh that when we use that term and to refer to those very blessed righteous predecessors who came before us the great companions of the messenger of Salat al-Saleh and who no one knew knowledge and what it really was more than they did and how to put it into practice to see the fruits of that like they did and then after them the blessed generation of the tabi'in who grew up on the hands and were trained by the generation that was directly trained by the Prophet himself Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam this is what Imam al-Razadi is essentially saying and what he is contending this conception I'm going to with the development of the sciences summarize it for you add certain things to it and synthesize it in a way where it's powerable, easy for you to understand and he lays us all out in book one of Dahi al-Madin this is just as relevant today as it was during his time and this is an amazing thing because we are part of a tradition meaning by that an unbroken chain of narration back to the Prophet himself Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam we are speaking about knowledge in a book that was written roughly that nine and a half centuries ago that is amazing and if you would compare what a work in English would look like nine and a half centuries ago it would be very different because the English language has changed dramatically over the past nine and a half centuries so this is a great blessing and sometimes you have to pause to really think about what it is that these great ulama have done and how pertinent their knowledge in scholarship is even for us in this day and age one of the sub chapters that the first book on knowledge is that he talks about the great imams and he means specifically by that the great mujtahid imams that represent the various schools of thought and those are of course imam Abu Hanifa imam Malik imam Muhammad ibn Idrisah Shafi'i and imam Ahmad ibn Hanifa and I think he mentions imam layth ibn Sa'ad who didn't have too many students so there wasn't as much preservation of this rule but he says that in addition to these four individuals incredible ability to that contribute to the sharia of our prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and develop methodologies to extract legal rulings from the Quran and the sunnah which we all know that they have all four of them were the greatest jurists of the ummah of our prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam that Allah to barakah that is selected and there were others of course but these are the four that he decreed that their schools remain with us to this day in age these four individuals were special and they were the most brilliant people and also they had other traits and this was his point is that when we talk about true knowledge having that a strong intellect does not suffice and our day in age saying that someone who is simply smart and scores high on the SATs are their achievements or that is taking AP classes and has a four point something GPA or going into an Ivy League school or then when they start doing their postgraduate studies whatever test that they're taking the GREs or whatever else the MCATs or whatever that they get high scores on these tests we share this even with people that are not of our faith so there can't be anything truly distinguished in that regard truly distinguished meaning that which would take us closer to Allah if that be the case so it's not enough so we're speaking in the context of the scholarship of his time but it equally applies to every single one of us what it is that we are doing we are on whatever company that we work for whether we have a craft or a trade or we are a professional of some sort or whatever it may be whatever it is that we are doing that's a whole discussion it's not a separate discussion it's a part of this discussion but we're not going to go into that we know there are principles behind everything it is that we do for all of that and we need to be very careful to create a dichotomy where we see it as dhu and deen we need to be very careful everything is deen dichotomy in your mind that dhu and deen otherwise you are wasting an opportunity to draw near that you spend preparing to work or actually working and in fact if you just simply change your way of looking at things you change your mindset you change your framework by which you look at things and you learn how to make an intention and exercise this unique ability that we have as human beings to choose we have freedom of choice and a limited realm of possibilities and you learn what it means to be sincere in those intentions and how to expand your intention to how to make multiple intentions and then make intentions in everything that is that we do you will turn the time that you spend at work which is not just the old school 40 hour work week now we're talking about much more 60 to 70 hours of our lives on a weekly basis where you get a reward for an obligation every single moment you are at work if you're intending by working to take care of your family and to that be in a position where you don't have to ask for a handouts rather that you can then give back but first of all your thesis is in the law if you die in the process you get the reward of a martyr and secondly every moment that you're at work because of your righteous intention you are getting the reward for an obligation and then if you look at someone like Imam al-Razadi who is a great musli and his conception of the Fard Ki Faya there's hardly a career that is really outside of his understanding of what Fard Ki Faya is that is a communal obligation sit with a person of learning and learn the intention so that the career track that you are on the field that you are in is that somehow you're fulfilling a Fard Ki Faya a communal obligation and sometimes that just needs a little bit of thought