Transcription
Pray at night, but for a little, half of it. Or pray a little less than half, half of the night. Allah says, "Pray half the night, less or more." It doesn't matter. More than half? Fine. Less than half? Fine. But what's the most important thing Allah wants the Prophet to do at night? Make sure you do one thing, oh Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wasallam. Make sure you recite the Quran with a slow melody. Take your time with the Quran. Don't be in a rush. The time you spend in prayer doesn't matter. What is more important to me, oh Muhammad, is that you take your time with the Quran. Why? Why doesn't the time, the quantity matter, the pages, the number of verses? Then Allah explains, "We, what I'm sending down to you, is a heavy word. It's not something you can run through. It's something very heavy."
Sometimes there are some books you read. You think you could read 50 pages a day, but you, you read the first page and you read it again and you read it again, and it didn't digest. It's deep. So, you don't want to go to the next page. The Quran is like that. They're heavy words, deep meanings, complex concepts. You can't race through. Allah is telling the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, "This is a heavy word, so take your time with it. Enjoy it. Let it taste the sweetness of it. Don't be in a rush."
The Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam's closeness to Allah, we would have to start at one starting point, which is the night prayer. And this is the first principle for all of us. If you want to write it down, write it down: You need private, quality time with Allah every day. We all need private, quality time with Allah. We need time, even if it's 5 minutes, time for you to talk to Allah. Time for Allah to talk to you. Non-negotiable time. If you don't do this, my day is incomplete. I feel an emptiness in my chest. I feel a sense of anxiety. I can't move on with my day. I haven't had my breakfast, my spiritual breakfast. A day that does not have this private time with Allah is an empty day, a spiritually empty day. You will feel numb. The days you spend like this will slowly catch up to you until one day you crash and burn. You suddenly miss a salah, an obligatory salah. You snap at your parents. You scam someone in a transaction. You think, "How did I get here? Me? I'm such a, you know, I'm such a pious person. I'm so righteous. How did I end up breaking a rule?" It's because the day is collected. It accumulated. The rust on the heart accumulated until the heart became numb. When the heart is numb, you can commit any crime because you will feel nothing. And so this is a non-negotiable. Every day, there must be time for you and Allah.
There were two times in the day that he would have *kalwa*, he would have a solitude time to himself, away from all distractions, away from all notifications, all people, with Allah. The first is the night prayer. And the second, after Allah says, "the recitation at that morning time, that pure time in the morning is witnessed by the angels." If he had people to visit, funerals to attend, old people to serve, an army to manage and organize, all of this would happen after Fajr. But that Fajr time, "Don't disturb me. Don't come to me. Don't call me. Don't message me. Don't..." This is my time with Allah. This one hour, and my whole day is determined by how this hour is spent. This is how the Prophet's mindset was.
You might think, "Okay, I've blocked my calendar. 30 minutes, let's say after Isha, or 30 minutes before Fajr. I've blocked my calendar. This is my time with Allah. Now, what do I do?" I want to give you three incidents from the Prophet's life, a snapshot. Someone took a picture, took a small video while he was in this moment. What was he doing?
First one: One day, who enters the house of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, before the morning prayer, and he finds him reciting the Quran in the night prayer. He finds that he's crying so much. It's like someone poured a bucket of water on his head. And after the salah, he asks him, "Oh Prophet of Allah, what led you to cry so much? I've never seen you sob this much before." The Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, says to him, "Do you know what Allah revealed to me tonight?" Allah revealed to me verses from the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, there are signs for people who think. These verses, the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, did not race through them. He spent time with them. He contemplated them until they moved him to tears. Until the tears took over his body. This moment is recorded until the end of time. It will be a timeless memory. That it is not about how many pages you recited, but it is about how many tears you shed. It is not about how quickly you finished, but it is about how deeply the impact was felt of those verses.
The second incident, and perhaps the most impactful incident in this context here of the night prayer of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam. Tells us, one night, the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, recited one ayah again and again and again and again the entire night. Imagine now, the night comes in at 8, and imagine Fajr is at 5, and imagine for 8 hours, 8 hours, he stood reciting one ayah. I challenge you to try it for 20 minutes, you'll get bored. What, what kind of a person does he need to be to enjoy one ayah for 8 hours? There are people here, they watch a cartoon, they watch a movie. If you say, "Can we watch again?" They say, "Oh my God, don't bore me. Please, again? I've already seen it. I know what's going to happen." Somebody's watched a match. You say, "Can you watch the highlights together?" "Oh my God, I've already seen it. I know what's going to happen." What does it take to taste the verses fresh again and again? And more interestingly, what was the verse that he was reciting? He recited this verse: "Oh Allah, if You punish them, they are Your slaves. You can do so. But oh Allah, if You forgive them, then You are the Mighty and You are the Authority." This ayah, he recited it again and again and again all night. Why? Because of the impact it had. Clearly, for him, the night prayer was not about quantity, but it was about the quality. Clearly, it was about the contemplation. It was not about the race to finish. And he tasted these verses, and he would make dua between verses. When he would stop at a verse that described paradise, he would pause. He would say, "Oh Allah, make us of the people of paradise." And when he would recite a verse of hellfire, he would pause and he would say, "Oh Allah, protect me from the hellfire." The sign of a prophetic prayer is not how much you recited, but how much you stopped. It's not about how much you recited, but how little you recited. It's not about how quick the was, but how slow it was. It is not about the length of your th, but how far your tears dripped onto the carpet.
The third situation: The Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, is praying at night until his feet became swollen. And asks him, "Why would you do this? Why do you pray for so long until your feet are swollen when your previous and future sins are forgiven? You have no need to do this." Basically. And he says, "How can I not be grateful to Allah?" Every car has an engine. Every airplane, if you look at a big Boeing, big, inside there's something moving it, making it move, something giving it speed, rotation, something giving it that horsepower. If we say the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, look at his worship, looks like a, like a jet, like a speeding jet. Look how far he's going, look how much mile he covers. But what was the engine that moved him? What was the *muharrik*? What was inside him? It was this feeling of being indebted to Allah. "How much Allah has given me, yet how little I show."
What we realize from this hadith, of the greatest worship of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, was not his bodily worship. It was the worship of the heart. Whatever you saw outside, inside, something far greater was happening. Whatever on the outside you saw of his *ruku* and his standing and his *sujud*, the level of gratitude to Allah in his heart far outstripped what you saw on the outside. It, the outside could not show you the depth of gratitude, the depth of shame he had from Allah, the depth of love of Allah, the depth of fear of Allah in his heart. You could never know how deep it was. You only got the iceberg. You only got the tip of the iceberg on the outside of the Prophet. And therefore, for most of us, for many of us, it is not that we don't pray salah on time, or we don't pray salah often enough. It is not that we don't care about the night prayer. It is that deep down, we do not have the same feelings towards Allah. The feeling of love, the feeling of fear, the feeling of indebtedness, of shame, the feeling of gratitude, that doesn't exist in the heart. If the engine is not working, the plane will not fly. If a camel doesn't have food, it will not walk. This is the nourishment of the heart, those emotions. If those emotions are not there, the outer worship is going to be empty. And this is what made the Prophet's worship greater than the worship of any man on this earth. He made the same movements. Arguably, some companions of the Prophet would go further than him. They would stand up for longer. They would fast more days. They would give more in charity, more quantity. But they could never match the depth of feeling in his heart. And so, if you want to compete, don't compete on quantity, but compete in depth and quality. This is what the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, teaches. What moves you to worship is greater than the worship itself. The intention is greater than the action. What is in the heart is greater than what is on the limbs.
If you want to get started emulating the salah of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, just the salah, for a month, my advice: Don't pray any additional voluntary prayers. Start with the obligatory salah. Pray it early. Pray it on time. Take your time. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Lunch break at work, maybe you get 30 minutes for lunch, 45 minutes for lunch. 10 minutes, 15 minutes salah. Book a room, find a place, find a corner, get rid of the distractions. Make this the most important part of your day. Try doing this for a month. Just focusing on the five day. When you get to this level, then you add a new habit: the 12 sunnah, the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, in some narrations 12, some narrations 14 sunnah voluntary prayers that he would pray every single day. These are the emphasized sunnah. Once you complete this, then the next level, the night prayer, the *dhuha* prayer. But don't try to race to the end straight away. Build it like a building, like a foundation, one by one by one until you get to a place where you can manage many things at once. First principle, if we want to emulate his worship: quality over quantity. Inward more important than what's happening outside. Okay, this is the first.
The second principle: The principle of consistency. The principle of consistency. The Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, says in a famous hadith, "The most beloved deeds to Allah are consistent, even if they are small." What does consistency mean? It means this action, this habit is so important in my life. If I miss it, I will compensate for it. I will make it up later. So, if the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, would miss his sunnah, his 12 sunnah, the 12 sunnahs he would pray every day, or 14 depending on which narration you take, he would make them up later. If he missed the night prayer, he would make it up in the daytime because these are his habits. These are the pillars of his day. They never change. They never move. They never sway. This is consistency. When you do something consistently, you start to realize on a daily basis, you won't see the effect, but there's a compound effect. See, every mountain starts with a pebble. One pebble, another pebble, another. Before you realize it's a mountain. The Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, this is how his worship would be small but consistent. So when we want to copy, embody, emulate the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, we have to start with something small that we can do. We have to be realistic. The Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, says when he's giving advice about this, he says, "Take on board deeds that you are actually realistically able to do." Allah doesn't get bored, but you might get bored. Don't overdo it. So start with once a week. You can do once a week, make it twice. You can do twice, make it three times, four times.