 We are going to continue, inshallah, in our series on practical spirituality. Today, the emphasis, inshallah, will be a section on regular devotions. The other things that we can be doing, whether it's every single day, every single week, every single month, or sometimes even every single year, that we keep up consistently in order to help us build our iman and in order to help us ultimately build our yakin, as we mentioned in the first class, and we've been following this book written by the great knower of Allah, the Book of Assistance, which he mentioned in the first chapter, that yakin is the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal for us is to increase our certainty, our yakin in Allah SWT, and that there are various levels of yakin. And as someone's faith increases, they will go from the levels, as mentioned in the Quran, from ilm al-yakin, the knowledge of yakin, to aina al-yakin, to the eye of certainty, so from the knowledge of certainty, right? So the knowledge of certainty would be, as we mentioned in the example, and as mentioned by the scholars, that if somebody tells you that, oh, there is a big lake in the middle, right at the border of California and Nevada, there's a big lake, and you believe that person, like, oh, this person is a truthful person, you know, I'm going to believe them, right? So if Amir Sundiata told me, you know, there's a lake, got to go to the lake some point, you know, it's at the middle of, in between California and Nevada, there's a lake called Lake Tahoe, and I'm like, okay, yeah, I don't really know what that is, but I'll believe you because I trust you, right? So a truthful person tells you about it, you now have a knowledge that you're certain that that thing exists based on your knowledge. At some point, you go and decide, you know, I'm going to go and I'm going to actually visit this lake. I want to actually see the lake. I believe him, and now I want to go see it. So I say, hey, can we go and make a plan? I want to go visit this lake that you're talking about. That allows us to, when you actually see the lake with your own eyes, right? In this case, referring to the lake, Lake Tahoe, you actually now achieve what's called, the eye of certainty. You have seen, not just believed it, but you believed it, and now you actually saw it. And then you're like, you know, I for sure see this, I know this body of water exists, but I want to have one level of deeper experience. I want to actually have the experiential reality of immersing myself in this lake. So I'm going to jump in it. And so now you go and you jump in the lake and you feel the water. You feel how cold it might be. You can actually see what's going on inside of the water and you feel that entire experience. That's known as Hakal Yaqeen, the truth of certainty. And so you graduate from these levels. And just like there are these levels that we mentioned as an example, these types of levels exist in Iman. That most of us are operating at the level of the knowledge of certainty. We believe in what the Prophet SAW told us. We have not seen it. And as Allah mentions in the Quran in Surah Al-Baqarah, that these are people who believe in the Ghaib. They believe in the unseen. But if you continue to examine the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet SAW further, you will see that there are ways that you are actually now able to see what's going on. As Allah mentions, the example of Sayyidina Ibrahim, that we showed Ibrahim, the Malakuta Samawati Wal Ard. We showed him the next realm of the Samawati and the Ard. And so that is a possible way for you to achieve this station. Just like you and I don't see the angels that are on our shoulder. We can't see them. There are people who have had, who have reached levels of Yaqeen, where these things are no longer just beliefs that they have. They actually have now experienced them. And then you get to the deeper levels of Haqqal Yaqeen, like the statement of Sayyidina Ibrahim Ali, that he said, if the veil between me and the unseen were to be removed, if the veils were to be removed, I would not increase in my Yaqeen even one atom. That if you could see everything right now, whatever different unseen realities take place, whether it is in the Masajid of Allah, or whether it is in the Mulk of Allah, whatever the different realities are there taking place, you and I, generally speaking, maybe there are people here who have that experience, but generally speaking, people can't see those things. Imam Ali mentioned that he had such a strong level of Yaqeen, that it didn't matter whether it was veiled or unveiled, because of his level of certainty. So that's the essence of what we're trying to do here, is we're trying to ultimately in this life increase our Yaqeen. And so your Iman is one part of it, and that is your actual belief, and then your knowledge that you have is another part of it, and then the actions that you do are another part of it. So you have to have all three. You have to have belief, you have to act, and you have to have knowledge of that action, and now you start to get to this trifecta to help increase your certainty. If you just have the action, let's say you just give charity. You have no belief that charity will benefit you, and you have no knowledge of the rulings of charity. Well, you could be a non-Muslim, and you could give charity, and it won't actually have any spiritual benefits, right? It could just be philanthropic. It's a good thing, masha'Allah, but if there's no intention attached to it, it's not like you're giving intention of zakat. Zakat requires intention, let's say, or sadaqah requires intention. So similarly, in our faith, in order to actually increase in Yaqeen, then we have to couple that with belief, and then the belief increases as you do what? As you do more good deeds. The belief starts to increase. You'll find yourself as you start to immerse, and you'll notice if you ever have periods of time where you go into a, especially Ramadan, where there's a lot of good deeds that are being done, they're mandatory, or if someone's blessed to go to Umrah or Hajj, and there's a lot of good that's being done, you'll actually start to find your faith is increasing. You start to come out with a stronger Yaqeen, the plan of Allah, and a stronger belief in whatever is going to happen to you, is happening with some wisdom as an example. So that is the ultimate goal. Now, how do you actually do that? He mentions that the way to start doing this is to fill your time with acts of worship, and again, he's giving us the like higher goal, right? He's saying if you want to be an A-plus person on the Day of Judgment, you want to get that report card from Allah, and you want to have an A-plus is what you do. He says you must fill your time with acts of worship, such that no period of time elapses, whether it's by day or by night, without you using it in some act of goodness. Some act of goodness. Now, he doesn't limit this to a recitation in the Quran, to praying the Salawat, to giving charity, and so on and so forth. There are other things that you do on a regular basis that... Can we actually turn the light back on? Did you turn it off? Sorry, is this for the live stream? Yeah, thanks. And so he mentions that this will now, what this will allow you to do is it will bring about the barakah in your time. Because what is barakah? The spiritual blessing in your time. And we're going to get into this discussion shortly about time management, but it's a very, very, very integral part of our religion is to manage your time effectively. You cannot succeed in this being if you can't manage your time. You cannot stop the religion if we can't manage our time. It's absolutely essential that we know how we go about managing our actions, managing our days, managing the weeks and months we have, because the time is really the only capital that we have in this life. So he said, this is how you bring about the spiritual blessing in your time. And this is confirmed. He's confirming the statement that Allah SWT makes in Surah Al-Asr, the famous surah Allah swearing by time. Allah does not swear, as mentioned by the commentators of the tafsir, that Allah does not swear except by something great. And you see many references to time in the Qur'an as something being sworn by. Al-Asr is very explicit. Allah mentions wad-doha by mid-morning, wal-layl by night and so on and so forth. So there are different periods of time that he's swearing by. Wal-fajr by the time of Fajr by dawn. But wal-asr, actually saying by time. Inna al-insana la fi khusr, that the majority of mankind is in loss. As time progresses in your life, you're losing. It's just going. The finish line is getting closer and closer, which is the day of judgment. And death ultimately is your day of judgment, because after that, generally speaking, there's very few other ways to get deeds in your book. Wal-asr, inna al-insana la fi khusr, that the majority of mankind is in loss, except what? Except those who believe. So there's a group that's not in loss. You have the people who are losing and who are declining as life goes by. Then there's people who they're exempt from that. They're increasing. Those who believe. But you can't just believe with good deeds. So belief has to be coupled with good deeds. You cannot get through this life. There's people who want to attain nearness to Allah, inshallah, without coupling the two. So if we ever think to ourselves, oh yeah, I believe, I believe, but I don't have to do any of the good. I have hope and Allah is all merciful, but I'm not going to do any of the good deeds attached to it. That's a deception from shaitan. It's one of the ways shaitan will try to get to you is to try to make you think or make us think that we don't have to link good deeds to the belief. This happens at every level, whether it's at the level of our worship or whether it's at the level of our appearance, whether it's at the level of what we choose to eat, whether it's at the level of what we choose to wear, all of the things we do, ultimately, Allah has given us stipulations of what we should do and what we shouldn't do, and we have to fall somewhere in between those. Ideally much, much closer on the end of what we should do in accordance with the sunnah of the Prophet s.a. Except those who believe, and then he mentioned another category, and those who enjoin to good what the wasab el-haq, that those who enjoin to truth and those who encourage patience. So these are the people who are not in loss. Everybody else, by time, is declining. So that's a way to kind of evaluate. Progress for the Muslim is not about how much money goes increasing in our bank accounts, not about how our investments are doing, not about how successful we are at work, not about how many houses we have or how many fancy cars we drive or all of the fancy titles that we might have, and so on and so forth. That has nothing to do with progress. Nothing wrong with having success in the dunya, but that's not progress. Progress for the Muslim, because you could be having all of those things and you're declining. It doesn't matter if you have billions of dollars and you're trying to get to Mars. If you don't believe in the creator of Mars, it's pointless. Absolutely zero benefit and there's people in this time that reached a pinnacle of dunya. It's not going to benefit them one iota if it's not a company with belief. And we shouldn't be in awe of these people, the likes of these big billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and whatnot. Unless it's a company by belief, there should be no awe of them. You can learn from their business skill to apply it to benefit the umma. That's it, but there should not be general reverence. We do not revere people of dunya just because of their level of focus on the dunya. Because the Muslim is what? They're gaining in this life through good deeds, through belief, and joining truth and through patience. Those are the four things that are mentioned in Surah Al-Asr that oppose the decline of the majority of mankind, as Allah is mentioning in the Surah. Imam Al-Hadad says that the way to achieve this barakah in your time is to fill it with good deeds. And then he brings a very, very, very impressive and famous and important quote by Imam Al-Ghazali. The famous proof of Islam, one of the foremost, if not one of the most influential scholars in the history of the religion, Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali. And he mentions in the book Bidayat al-Hidayat, the beginning of guidance, if we just take this whole thing it will be sufficient for us. He says, your time should not be without any structure. You should never have any moment of time that doesn't have some structure to it. Such that you occupy yourself just arbitrarily with whatever comes along. Rather, he says, instead of doing that, you should take yourself to account and structure your worship during the day and during the night, and assign to each period some type of activity that you're going to be doing. Now you will start to see the blessing in your time. You will start to see the blessing in your day. He said, a person who lives their life and leaves themselves, himself or herself, without any plan of what to do, is very similar to the animals. So Allah mentions in Surat Al-An'am, the cattle. The cows, if you ever just kind of drive by Highway 5 or any mountainous area, you just see the cattle just chilling. Just hanging out. Grazing. No worry. And there's something good about not having any worry but also having nothing to do, literally. No plan. The cattle are simply just existing. That's their purpose. They exist. But we have a deeper purpose. That we did not create mankind and jinn except to worship me. Allah mentions in the Quran. And jinn have that deeper purpose. And so he says, so you don't want to be like the animals who are just chilling all the time. There should be some structure to your life. And then he says, your time is your life. And your life is your capital. Your capital in the sense of what you actually have to earn the next life with. So by the time that you have, you will earn the bounties of Allah in the next life. Or, and we ask Allah for protection, or we won't. And then he says that every single breath of yours is a priceless jewel because once it's irreplaceable, once it's gone, it doesn't come back. I could go to City Fenton and if I were to ask him, hey, you know, I want to take an hour of your time. You got 24 hours in the day. I want to buy one hour of your day. And you have 23 hours, I want 25 hours. It's impossible. There's no way I can buy the time. I can't trade my time with other people. I could buy things to do with the time. I could potentially hire someone to do something in the time. But I cannot literally buy time back. And so we know there's many, many, many traditions that mention this, whether it's hadith or other traditions, that people will get to the point of death and then they start to wish, I just need a couple more days. I need a couple more days. I just need to rectify my life. At that point, the Angel of Death will give us more time once the clock, the time has been completed. And so he says here, Imam al-Khazali, and he keeps it very real, he says, don't be like fools who rejoice each day as their wealth increases and their life decreases. So look now, I'm a millionaire. Now I have this much money and so on and so forth. And the life is just decreasing and the good deeds are not increasing. There is a spiritual bank account that everybody has here are writing down everything you and I do. And that is the ultimate measure. The ultimate measure of success. And so you can have somebody who in this life with very, very simple life may not have much in the dunya, but they have immense, immense, immense station with Allah because they are spending their time trying to get close to him and serving him, serving his people, serving his deen, serving the community, whatever whatever forms of good that they are able to do. So he says don't actually rejoice. Don't feel truly happy about something except in an increase of knowledge and or an increase in good works. Those are the things that you should really like I mean there's a lot to be grateful for but he's saying don't rejoice except that you're seeing an increase in these things instead of rejoicing over what everybody else in the dunya is rejoicing over. So when you see increase in knowledge or good works and he'll talk about good works not limited again to ibadah specifically that you do, serving your family taking care of your children cooking food for your family serving the community, working working to earn a living. All of these have done with intention as we talked about in I think the last class we mentioned the class before the last class intention it can all become good deeds everything you do in the realm of permissible with the right intention. We're eating a meal and you make the intention that I'm intending to eat this meal so that I can gain the strength to worship Allah and gain the strength to serve my family and so I can follow the command of Allah in the Quran that he tells me to eat from the provision that he has given and so on and so forth that every time all the food you get to enjoy as long as halal becomes linked to good. So then he says there are your true friends who will accompany you in your grave the good deeds and knowledge. He says when your spouse, your wealth your children, your friends will all remain behind. They might accompany us to the point where they bury us and then maybe some people who really love us might stay there for hour, maybe someone for two hours reciting Quran and making dua and asking for forgiveness but at some point everybody's going to go back as we've all done Alhamdulillah even we've had the chance to bury some of our loved ones may Allah have mercy on all of those in our families who have passed away but we eventually leave right and the only two that are accompanying you in your grave are your good deeds, your knowledge, the things that you had earned and that's going to be those are the friends that they're suggesting so the goal of scholars like Imam al-Ghazali and Imam al-Hadad is to make us orient our focus entirely on the afterlife and then so that you can get to a point where you might be focused a lot on the afterlife and then you'll eventually also focus on this life but Imam al-Ghazali he mentions the point in his in the Ahia al-Lumuddin that he says the arrival of the religious sciences he mentions that sometimes you're all the way over here and you need to get to the middle and so they will pull you by giving you examples that are all the way on the other end of the spectrum to get to the middle so like for example if you're really really the example he gives in the book is if you're if we're really stingy just super stingy we never want to give money even spend on our own family we count every penny right he says that your the cure for that is to become overly generous to start giving a lot and a lot and not not even think about it just keep giving and giving until you get to the point where you get in the middle where you're now much more balanced about your giving right so like you don't think twice about okay you know you want to treat someone to food instead of like oh I hope they treat me because I don't want to spend my money right that type of thing although these days of the venmo they'll just send you a venmo request afterwards so you know may not apply anymore but that's the the goal so they will orient us towards trying to get to a point where it might sound like a lot structure all of your time to be filled with good but they're trying to teach us the path of of immense nearness to Allah you have you have stations in the Quran right Allah mentions the ashab he mentions the ashab and he mentions he mentions the people of the right hand the people of the left hand and then he mentions those brought nigh and those brought near like really close to Allah and the scholars of the hereafter the people who focus on the hereafter they want us to be and they want to be from those who are in absolute closest ranks in the first rows to enter heaven with the prophets with the prophets and with all the prophets and that's the intention we should have and in our time the blessing of our time is we can do the basics and a few more things and we can achieve very very big stations unlike in the old days where they had to do like and we'll talk about this shortly like thousands of rakats that some of these greats would pray at night because of generally speaking society was in a very very good state and our situation where the majority of societies engage in haram and we are if we're trying to do something good the blessing of that as per the hadith that we mentioned I think two classes ago prophet sallam said that at the end of time people will come and they will have the reward of 50 and sahaba asked 50 of them or 50 of us and he says 50 of you because you have people to assist you in doing good and they will have nobody to help them out and so amongst the ways to try to do that is to try to have regular structure to your time so what is the way to do that he says the way to do that is to assign specific devotions that you do in each time what are known as orad so the singular form of that is a weird a weird is known as a spiritual litany something you do every single day that is a form of devotion in order to start seeking the finding the barakah in your time and so we'll mention some of the different sunnah orad that the prophet sallam would be telling us to do and so he mentioned that each specific act of devotion that you do has a particular effect on the heart the spiritual heart and has a particular light to it a particular nur that comes to the heart and there's certain types of assistance that will come to you in your life in this life that will assist you in this life and inshallah in the next life and to help increase you in stations of nearness to Allah and so the people who fill their time and have a structure to every morning every afternoon, every evening every night with and putting in certain vicar that they do essentially they will start to see this benefit in this structure in their in their life and so many as some of the scholars have mentioned that one of the great scholars he said that the arrival of spiritual blessings depends on the what are known as the audad, the litanies that someone is going to do and so if you want to have a deep inward if you want to actually start to go past this basic state of just feeling like we're just kind of holding on to our deen and never really progressing he says now you start to fill your time with these extra devotions and so then he says what exactly is this right? he says these can take the form of a few things and we're going to cover one of them today and inshallah we'll cover the next the rest of the next two or three classes will be on their others he says they can take the form of nafil prayers they can take the form of reciting Quran they can take the form of learning knowledge they can take the form of extra the card that you do they can take the form of reflection and then there's going to be a few others and this is in addition to now again we're talking here in addition to the obligatory so as mentioned in the famous hadith khudsi that my servant draws near to me I'm going to paraphrase the hadith that you start with the obligatory my servant draws near to me with the obligatory essentially and then he or she continues to do you start with the fara'id and then you continue to do nafil actions to do extra and he then says until I love him or her and when and then he mentions when I love them I become the seeing by which they see and the hands by which they strike and hearing by which they hear and so there's sons of commentary just on that specific hadith main takeaway for right now is that you start with the basics and then there's the path of immense nearness to Allah and the path to the immense nearness to Allah has to include a significant amount of additional actions that we do and so the point he's getting to now is that the way we manage our time will allow us to do those additional actions so you can meet people who there's some people who let's say every Ramadan Khatam of Quran it's good solid right we do Khatam of Quran and Ramadan and there's some people who they're doing Khatam the same Himmah and Ramadan every single day okay a Juz a day take someone 30 minutes that's like one show one episode maybe even half an episode of a show and they're doing one Khatam because 30 days 30 Juz by replacing the time someone else might be on social media or Netflix or so on and so forth they're deciding Quran and then there's people who they might do Khatam a week it might take them two hours of Quran every single day that they're doing but they have a whole routine at Fajr they do a Juz at Doher they do a Juz at Maghrib they do a Juz and maybe at the Hajj they do a Juz right and now they might be doing an entire Khatam of Quran in a whole week they're different so different degrees of Khatam will have but his point is start with something and do it every single day as we know in the Hadith the best actions are those that are consistent and they have a certain blessing in your life they will have a certain type of blessing and so the most essential ones are having a word of extra prayers having a word of reciting Quran and having a word of learning and having a word of doing the sunnah do'az that the Prophet would do every morning and every evening those are the absolute most essential those are like the fundamentals in order to be able to traverse the spiritual path and they will help you increase in yakin and help you tread this path to start to increase in nearness to Allah and so he begins I'll pause there before I get into the specifics does anybody have any questions yeah can you repeat that sorry yep definitely we'll be inshallah having an entire class just on the sunnah do'az that the Prophet would do every single day among which there's do'az in the morning and the evening that are found in various Hadith and many of the scholars have compiled them one very very good compilation is known as the where the latith it is known as the subtle litany compiled by Imam al-haddad where it's the do'az that the Prophet's son would do in the morning and then added to it are some of the do'az that the sahaba or the righteous would also do in the morning takes about 7 to 10 minutes to do and is recommended to do after fajr anytime from fajr up until someone couldn't do it at fajr at do'ah right and so example of that do'ah now it comes 3 times 3 times 3 times those are surahs of the Quran there's a do'ah known as Sayyid al-Isdaghfar Allahumma anta rabi la ilaha illa anta khalaqtani wa an'abdu that's one of the things that we are supposed ideally we should be doing every morning and every evening and is known as the master of repentance or of forgiveness of seeking forgiveness another beautiful do'ah Allahumma khair haadal yawm fattahu wa nasrahu wa nurahu wa barakat wa dada for the good all the good of this day and the openings of this day and the blessings of this day and the victories of this day and the newer of this day and then something similar at night so those are examples right and these by the way are not just only things they will assist you in the afterlife but their effect in this life will be immense you will be able to achieve significant amounts more in our time and accomplish a lot more and feel a lot better and have far less as we mentioned in the first class one of the signs of increasing certitude is less anxiety and more is tranquility and so when we do these things this is now the practical ways trying to focus on the specific steps we can take to increasing our tranquility and decreasing our anxiety so we will get into those in shalom any other questions thus far yes yep no it's a good question let me just reference it so the question is iman ilm and deeds right oh I mentioned ilm and amal that would be a slip on my side it would be your iman your belief your deeds and your knowledge so your knowledge isn't really knowledge if it's not benefitting you so your knowledge would have translated into some type of belief and then it would be the good deeds and the knowledge does that make sense so that would be my fault right right so the question was how did the sahaba attain the aynil yaqeen it's an excellent question so the sahaba as the prophet said the sahaba are like stars you will be guided whichever one of them you follow the various sahaba had one teacher they're the same teacher that all of us have but there were different paths that they might have taken based on specific strengths that they had so somebody might be spending a fair amount of time teaching learning teaching an individual about that taking care of their parents someone else might be spending a significant amount of time as you mentioned out in the way of Allah someone else might be spending a significant amount of time because Allah has blessed them with wealth with giving lots and lots of wealth but all of them will have a portion of every other good so there's not one path that's very very important to understand sometimes in our time people think this is the path, this is the only path and if you don't take this path you're gone, that's not how it works there's various paths to Allah based on why you have traditionally the Turuk the various tarikas which exist in the paths of spirituality and they have the same core principles but then there's different methods by which nearness to Allah comes but the same core principle very much exists so as you mentioned, let's say being out in the way of Dawah in the way of Tabligh example excellent way to attain this nearness but if you don't have a portion of all the other good a good character of reciting Quran of waking up at night of learning knowledge of being firm in your foundations then you're not really applying that approach correctly let's say you have to have that plus something else someone else might not be able to do that that might not be their path their path might be that Allah has blessed them with a lot of wealth and they are spending a lot of wealth and they are also doing the regular devotions that they need to do so there's various paths so then he gets into what are the and we'll get into this section and then we'll cover the rest next time so he gets into what are one of the main litanies, regular devotions that we need to be doing and he mentions that everybody should have a certain weird of sunnah prayers and then the natho prayer that we should be doing on a consistent basis and he gives examples of some of the greats of our time or of the time and the generation of the prophet sallam and then the generation after the prophet sallam and the type, the amount of time that they would spend praying the hajj the amount of time that they would spend in qiamalli and some would pray hundreds of rakats at night time, some would stand up the whole night in prayer two thirds of the night in prayer some would stand one third of the night in prayer but a significant amount of time would go in our time it's sufficient at least we're doing 10, 15 minutes before fajr where we're awake and we're trying to draw near to Allah that it is a very, very, very, very, very special time for us to try and follow the sunnah of the prophet sallam of praying the hajj the prophet sallam himself would be up not for the entire night a strong portion of the night he would sleep for a portion and then he would be awake for the rest of the night praying the salat of the hajj but for the believers some portion of that is important in order to start to experience the nearness to Allah that we might want to be trying to accomplish right so again we're talking like small, small portions and it comes in hadith the prophet sallam said in prayer at night for it was the way of the virtuous who came before you, it was the way of the salihin it draws you nearer to Allah it atones for your sins it protects you it forbids you from evil you will start to see shields of protection from evil and it protects the body from sickness as just a few of the examples mentioned in the hadith and we see in another hadith narrated in the collection of Imam Muslim that there is a time in the night that no Muslim servant encounters in which he or she asks Allah for some good of the world or the hereafter and Allah grants it to them and he said this happens every single night and there is a time when do'a is just accepted you ask Allah for whatever you want another hadith Allah mentions in the hadith that is there anyone praying that Allah mentioned in the hadith that Allah in no anthropomorphic way sends into the lower heavens and he asks in the last one third of the night is there anybody praying that I may answer them anybody making do'a that I may answer their do'a is there anybody seeking forgiveness that I may forgive them and is there anybody asking that I may give to them and again this happens every single night and so it is amongst the key key key key ingredients in the path of spirituality for us to try to have a portion of the night in which we rise in which we pray to Allah if we cannot do this before Fajr the ideal time the scholars mention is in the last two or so hours before Fajr so Fajr comes in at 5.45 or 5.50 wake up at 5.30 make do'a and pray a few rakats but if we can't do that pray after Salat al-Isha prayer after Salat al-Isha the better one would be considered to be waking up before Fajr so that would be one example of something consistent that we should be trying to do and so there are multiple benefits to this in addition to do'a as being answered this is a time when most importantly you are alone with Allah everybody is asleep and you're generally not praying this in a communal let's say in the masjid you're generally praying this and it's a time for you to actually have an intimate dialogue an intimate conversation with Allah where you are presenting your needs you are showing Allah your weakness before him you are asking him for assistance in all of your affairs you are making do'a to him you are saying Ya Allah I need your help in this because as Allah mentioned in the Quran during the day you're busy we're busy during the day many times if Hamd Allah we get a chance to pray we finish the prayers are back to work or back to family or back to school or whatever it is how many of us can sit for 20 minutes just making do'a in the middle of the day right? but this is the time of night where we should be trying to do this if we can't do it every day it doesn't mean we don't do it once a week so the goal here is to try to do things with some level of consistency so if we can do it every day Alhamdulillah if we can't maybe we just do it on Friday morning because it's a very blessed time the night before Juma or the morning of Juma we can't do that maybe once a month but at least some portion so we have a portion of all of the good as per the question that you want to have a portion of every single good and then he mentions the other Nawafil prayers that we should be trying to do so among those are would be the prayer now we went from the night prayer to what's known as the mid-morning prayer the do'a prayer various various hadith about do'a but the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam says that every morning comes and on each of your limbs and joints a charity for each limb and joint that's working is due and I'm paraphrasing the hadith here and he said each tasbih subhanallah is a charity each tahmid each alhamdulillah is a charity each laylahe illallah is a charity and each taqbir is a charity and he said that two rakahs performed in the mid-morning would suffice for all of that it basically suffices for the thanks you and I have to give to Allah for everything working throughout the day Satu al doha is prayed anytime from about 15 minutes after sunrise to about 10 minutes before the bohar that would be the time that we should try to add this if we're not already doing it, salatu al doha there's many many many many other benefits that inshallah we'll try to cover next time for salatu al doha so two specific ones salatu al hadjad and salatu al doha that these are sunnahs that the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam did not lead he established them and he encouraged us to do them and the sahaba ikram and the salaf were all on these sunnahs the one caveat here is that if we have missed prayers missed prayers meaning there was a period of time where we were Muslim and we just, you know, we weren't praying and or we weren't really taking maybe we prayed a few of the prayers we never prayed fajr or we never prayed some ishah or whatever it is the missed prayers take priority over all these other other noato prayers that we have to first get through our missed prayers and then we start to do these other ones right and what some of the scholars recommend is if you have, let's say three years of fajr to make up from the time or ten years of fajr or whatever it is that if you still want to get the benefit of these prayers you pray those fajr at let's say you're up at the hadjad but you're instead of making two rakat for nafil for a supragratory devotion you are making the intention to make up the fajr that you missed and then you're keeping track and so insha'Allah you will still get the benefit of being up at the time and the benefit of the adh being answered and the forgiveness being granted and insha'Allah with our intention the benefit of the extra good deed as well but we have the missed prayers to make up it's very very important when you have missed prayers according to many of the ulama you don't even pray the hadjad masjid you pray the missed prayers instead every second you have to do a prayer the hadjad is not even white that missed prayers will not get cleaned from your record they have sin of them can get cleaned through repentance but the actual debt that you have due does not get cleaned that we owe that and from my understanding that is the view of the form of dahib so missed prayers are due and so in addition to any of the fara'id that we're doing there's the sunnah prayers which will lay out we have two sunnah that we should be doing before fajr there's in hanafi school at least four sunnah before dohr, two sunnah after dohr we're mentioning right now what are called the sunnah mo'akta that the emphasize sunnahs there are two after maghrib and two after saath al-ishat for the one who has missed prayers according to the other madahib they shouldn't pray even most of the sunnahs they should just be praying except for the sunnah of fajr they should be praying their missed prayers according to mama habu hanifa they should do the sunnah mo'akta and the missed prayers which is definitely not easy to do but that's what madahib mama boohanifa mentioned but the missed prayers take priority over any extra action that we're trying to do but it doesn't mean we just spend one day doing a hundred missed prayers and then we never do any more after that if we have let's say thousands of missed prayers after those we count them up and we start to divide them out over a period of let's say you know a few months or years however long it is but those will take priority and there's a difference of opinion on salat al-Tarawee and but many of the ulama do mention to do the missed prayers in lieu of salat al-Tarawee as well and so these are the specific Nawafil actions that he mentions and then there's one more known as salat al-Awabin so we mentioned salat al-Tahajid we mentioned salat al-Duhah and then there's another one known as salat al-Awabin which is known as the prayer between maghrib and Isha and the Prophet ﷺ said that Allah erects a palace in Jannah for the one who prays 20 rakahs between maghrib and Isha again he's giving us lofty lofty goals here 2 or 4 extra is good enough but if we have time to do more and then he said in different hadith that the one who prays 6 rakahs in sets of 2-2-2 after maghrib and does not speak ill in between will have them equal the worship of 12 years this is known by many of the ulama salat al-Awabin so these are another another weird, another litany of consistency that we should try to do and so the main thing here as we mentioned is it's about filling our time with good it's not that all we do all day is pray that's not the takeaway but if we're finding ourselves getting distracted a lot and we're finding ourselves unable to focus and we say why can't I have khushu in my prayers it's because you cannot find khushu in your prayers generally speaking in our time if we just do the bare minimum you have to practice it's like warm-up sets the sunnah prayers are like the warm-up sets and then you get into the fire then that's the main work out if you never do the warm-up sets and you never stretch as Malik here can tell us masha'Allah you will not, you will only be able to be able to achieve success you'll end up getting hurt and you definitely won't be ready to actually work out right and Islam is very very similar to this metaphor that you have to do things consistently if you get into the gym one day a year is not going to do anything even if you go for 30 days in the year and then you don't go again it's not sufficient it's good but it's not sufficient you do so consistently 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes consistently has significant effects and so what he mentioned here at the beginning is there's spiritual lights which enter the heart that illuminate the heart and they benefit the heart but this is gained through structuring your time by adding extra devotion start with the fara'id you add the sunnahs and now you get to the supragatory and the first level of this are the supragatory prayers which the hajjad, duha and this other one mentioned that's less commonly done salat al awabin and then we're going to get into the inshallah in the next week the Quran that should be recited regularly so there's certain surahs which the Prophet of Islam encouraged us to recite we'll mention those next time among those surah al wakya, surah al mulq, surah yasin and then there are other amounts of Quran that we should be aiming to recite every single day working our way up to half a juz or a juz a day outside of Ramadan and then in Ramadan more and then the third category would be consistent amount of knowledge that we're seeking every day which is a very very critical aspect in our times there's a lot of us worshiping without knowledge and that essentially speaking is not worship that's going to benefit us if we're not making sure we know the core rules and then we know knowledge on top of that and so we'll mention what those types of knowledge are and then there's other goodies that we should be trying to do inshallah so we will end here if there's any questions and then we'll go ahead and raise a lot of the show any questions we have about 5 minutes for questions sorry I can't hear you yeah the sunnah of the fajr prayer yeah so the question was that according to some of the madahib the misprayers take precedence over the sunnah mo'akada prayers over the emphasize sunnah prayers so if you have again 10 years of misprayers to do that you do the farth and then you do those misprayers instead except the sunnah of fajr the sunnah of fajr I mean what's the name that in the shafi school that they use instead of sunnah mo'akada it's called starts with an R I forgot the ratsiba for the sunnah of fajr right but the sunnah of fajr has a very very specific station and the prophet sallam said in the hadith that to pray to rakah before fajr is better for you than the world and everything in it so I don't know the answer to the specific wisdom to why the sunnah of fajr is emphasized even in addition to the misprayers but that's my understanding of the hadith if someone else knows please feel free to chime in yes the best of the scholars of the day is very weak there's very little the idea of this is some of the scholars of the day in the last so you mentioned that some of the scholars say the hadith is weak the fact that the likes of the scholars like imama haddad has mentioned in the sufficient for us to take it as a practice imama haddad was a so that would be sufficient the one thing to mention about weak hadith according to the majority of the ulama in good deeds you are allowed to use weak hadith it is better than scrolling on your phone watching Netflix and all the other things we do that don't have permission in the hadith we'll take other questions now yeah so like I mentioned the majority of the ulama of the form of dahib have mentioned that taking weak hadith for fadaila al-amal is permissible you can agree to disagree but generally speaking to do good deeds and if ulama of the caliber the likes of imama haddad the likes of imama ghazali the likes of iman hajar al-asqalani the likes of shek Abdullah bin bayya and so on and so forth have given encouragement to do this it would be conserved sufficient but if someone individually doesn't want to do it you don't have to but you should not make in car or discourage other people from doing good that would be the understanding yeah any other questions yes sorry it's a bit hard to hear the question is if you have prior missed prayers and you pray tarawih would that invalidate tarawih no no it would not invalidate tarawih again there's a difference of opinion in the madahib but if you are able to you should have a portion where you're doing tarawih and then you should have a portion where you're doing your missed prayers or you prioritize your missed prayers till you get those done right and then you move on to tarawih but that would be kind of like an individual decision you would want to come to tarawih is an established sunnah it is a sunnah moakada so 20 rakah of tarawih is encouraged to do but if you do 10 that are missed prayers and 10 in the jamah for example as a way to try to work through it that would be something to do but the fasts of Ramadan are obviously obligatory if someone has missed fasts those would also take precedent over Nawafil fast that someone has to make any other questions I think there's one question online how do you actually count the amount of missed prayers you've missed seems daunting to think about the way that the ulema mentioned the missed prayers is that you calculate how many years you have been basically you're very very relaxed about prayers you assume you missed the majority of the prayers in those years then you multiply that by how many every years there actually are so if it's five you knew you never prayed any prayer five prayers a day times 365 times five years whatever number you would get to would be the amount of prayers you'd have to make or if you knew you prayed every prayer except fajr you would calculate that so alhamdulillah that would be sufficient exactly so Amir Sundiata mentioned that if for example you missed two years of fajr what you could do is you could whether it's at fajr time or any other time by the way missed prayers do not have to be prayed at that time of that prayer it can be prayed as long as not around time you pray at any time but let's say that before fajr or after dohar or so on and so forth you wanted to make up all the fajr that you missed you could do four rakahs for just one year and that would make up the two years of missed fajr because two rakah two rakah as an example Alhamdulillah ok so inshallah we'll go ahead and end with the duaab so is ok we ask you that you pardon us and forgive all of our sins and give us tofiq to implement any of the knowledge that we have we have learned we ask that you give us tofiq to pray extra Ya Allah and give us Taufiq to get near to you in every which way possible Ya Allah we ask that you show us the truth as truth and Allow us to implement it and show us falsehood as falsehood and allow us to stay away from India I mean we ask you for everything good to the purposes I'm asked for and we ask you for protection from everything evil that he asked Protection from was Allah was Salam abarik ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa Ali wa sahbihi salam alhamdulillahi rabbil alamin Somebody who wants to make Adhan and then we'll pray