A Glimpse Into the Afterlife | Night 5

The role of the prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, as a role model, as an exemplar within our lives. And then thirdly, to cultivate this conviction about the life of the hereafter and how that is the ultimate truth and the inevitability and the true reality of our existence.

And we've been taking a look at the different stages of the afterlife. Today, inshallah, we're going to look at a very fascinating, very powerful, very captivating, but also very heavy reality of the afterlife. And it can be summarized, it can be titled as a conversation between the people in paradise and the people in Hellfire. The people who got it right and the people who got it wrong. That they will have a conversation with one another about how they all fared and how they all ended up. And we'll, of course, reflect on it. And the reflections will take us in a lot of different directions, but we're going to use one particular passage from Surah number seven, which quite literally speaks about the stations. A term that's used more so in Christian theology that can be applied here is essentially the idea of purgatory. And in this Surah, in this chapter, this entire Surah, this very lengthy, rich, powerful, extensive chapter is named after this passage that we're going to be studying, going through verses 44-51. And as we've done every night, I'm going to start us off by just going through the passage, reading the verses, and paraphrasing the translation to make it a little bit more, uh, easier to understand. And then, inshallah, we'll go further into reflections with, umh, inshallah, the people of paradise will call out to the people in the hellfire, that indeed we have found what our Lord promised us to be true. "Did you also find what your Lord, what your Lord warned you about to also be true?" And they will respond by saying, "Yes, indeed."

And then a caller will make an announcement between them, proclaiming that the curse of God is upon those who oppressed and did evil. That who were these evildoers? They were those who blocked people from the path of God. And they always sought out problems and issues and controversy, and they denied and rejected the idea of the hereafter. That they just lived their lives in a way as if they didn't believe that the hereafter was actually real and that it was going to happen. Verse number 46, Allah says, "There will be a barrier dividing them." And on these planes, on these stations, there will be certain people. And each group will be recognizable by their condition and their state. That the people in paradise with their smiles and their joy and their happiness and their bliss, and the people in hellfire with their misery and their suffering and their regret and their remorse. And the people who are standing in the middle, their fate is yet to be decided, with their anxiety and their confusion. And then they will call out to the people in paradise and they will say, "Peace be upon you." "May peace be upon you." These people who are standing in the middle, waiting for their fate to be decided. They have not yet entered paradise, but they long, they hope, they pray that they will make it to paradise. Then these people who are standing in the middle, their fate is yet to be decided. Then they'll turn their attention to the people in the hellfire. Then they say, "Oh Allah, whatever you do, we are at your mercy. We are at your disposal, but we humbly beg you, do not place us with these evildoers." And then the people who are stuck in the middle, their fate is yet to be decided. They are still yet to be judged and reckoned. They will call out to some people in the hellfire and they recognize them. They recognize them from the life of the world. "Hey, I remember you. You lived in my neighborhood. You worked at the same place. Your kids went to the same school. That you used to pride yourselves on your group that you belong to, right? You prided yourself on your numbers and the power and the influence that you had amassed. It didn't help you today. Where's all of that today? And all the other things that gave you such a sense of false pride and false security. Where are those things today? Your money, your power, your influence, your arrogance. Where is all that today? You're burning in hell." And then those people that are standing in the middle, talking to the people in hell, they'll point to the people in paradise and they'll say, "Aren't those the people that y'all used to swear that they will nothing good will ever happen for them? That they were losers? >> They would never get anything."

And as they're having this conversation, just even in that conversation, the clarity that they are expressing, the clear recognition that they have of right versus wrong, in the midst of that conversation, an announcement will be made to those people who were stuck in the middle. Their fate is yet to be decided. An announcement will be made to them. "Go ahead and enter into paradise. You have nothing to fear. You will not grieve anything that you have left behind there. You will never know fear. You will never know sorrow. You will never know sadness. You will never know trouble. You will never know difficulty."

Then the people in the hellfire will call out to the people in paradise and they'll say, "Please, just pour down some cold water on top of us. Or just throw down some scraps that you have from what Allah has given you. Something, please. Anything." The people in paradise will say to the people in hellfire, "Allah has forbidden these blessings of paradise upon those who rejected believing in Allah, following the path of Allah. This is forbidden for you. You're not allowed access to this." This is the part that's really interesting. Those people in hellfire who are forbidden from the blessings of Allah. There's a hadith of the Prophet that says that someone when God gave them a certain responsibility and then they do not fulfill it properly or at least try to, they will not even be allowed to enjoy or smell the fragrance of paradise, let alone experience His blessings. So, who are these people who are in the hellfire who are forbidden from the blessings of Allah? This is the part that's interesting. They're not just like outright disbelievers who just said like, "God's fictional." Because Allah says they might have actually been people who might have loosely identified as Muslim, but Allah says they took their religion as a joke, as a game, just whatever it was, all just for the vibes, that's it. And they became deluded by the life of this world. They become distracted, deluded, intoxicated, drunk with the enjoyment and the pleasure of this life. Then Allah says, "Today, we have forgotten you just like you forgot that this day was going to come." And how vehemently you used to deny and ignore and reject the accountability in our signs that are all coming to fruition today.

So these are the verses, very, very powerful about this conversation. As you can see, there's so much here to get us started. Please, we ask Allah to make us of the people of Jannah. We ask Allah to make us of the people of Jannah. We ask Allah to make us of the people of Jannah. These verses are very powerful and, um, I'm happy that we chose this topic to discuss and, um, I'm really happy to speak over these verses because they're very powerful. And I want us to understand that our conviction in the hereafter, our conviction in the, is the ultimate thing that changes your life, that alters you from a trajectory of living for the sake of living to living for the sake of God and for the sake of purpose. And, and, and I say that because so many of us are stuck in certain sins. We're stuck in certain ways of life. And we always question, "How, how am I going to get out of that sin? How am I going to get out of that way of life? What's going to bring me out of that?" And I want to share with you before we go into these verses, because these verses are very heavy, but I need us to understand the power of these verses and what they do to your soul, what they do to your heart. She says in this beautiful hadith which is narrated in Bukhari, she says that the first thing to be revealed from the Quran were the Surahs of the Mufassal. The Surahs of the Mufassal are all the Surahs that talk heavily about heaven and hell. They're not the Surahs that talk about halal and haram. They're the Surahs that talk about where we're ending up, where we're going. There's three questions that every human being has and they face at some point in their life. Where did I come from? Who am I? My purpose and where am I going? And our deen has given us so much clarity on that. But what happens is we get, we get caught up in this dunya. So she says that the first verses to be revealed were not verses that dealt with all the rulings. They were verses that only talked about heaven and hell. Where are you going? Where's your life going? What, what track are you living on? Look at how you spend your time. That's the track you're going on. And so she says the first verses to be revealed were these verses that have, and she says that only talked about heaven and hell. And then she says, "Until people got strong once they got strong in their conviction on the, like, like they were walking around, y'all, and was real to them." I, I'll give you an example real quick. Hanzalah, one day, he's this great Sahabi. And one day he's just walking through Medina, just walking around and he's muttering something under his tongue. You know what he's saying? He's like, "I'm a hypocrite. I'm a hypocrite." And he's speaking third person. He's like, "Hanzalah is a hypocrite. Hanzalah." Abu Bakr bumps into him and Abu Bakr's like, "Yo, bro, what are you saying? Relax. Hold on. Explain." He's like, "No, no, no. Let me explain." He's like, "When I'm with the Imam, when I'm in the gathering like these, he's like, I can see Jannah. I can hear the sounds of Jannah, the music of Jannah, the joy and delight, the laughter. And then when the Prophet talks about hell, I can hear the screams of hell. I can hear the agony of hell. It's real to me." And then he says, "But when I go home, I lose all of that and I'm back in the dunya. So I oscillate between this state of seeing a." And this is my main point. They reached this point when Aakhira became real. And I think all of us, we need to ask ourselves, man, is Jannah real to you yet? Is it? Is it real to you? Are you really striving for it? Because I think some of us, it, it reaches a point where you've gotten enough dunya where you realize this dunya will never satiate you. So what does she say next? She says, "And then when people got strong in their belief in the, like, bro, bro, let, like, like is real. We're going there. What are we preparing for it?" She says, "Once that happened, it was only then that the halal and the haram came down." So, so a lot of us struggle with the halal and we struggle with the haram and we're like, "Yo, how can I change? How can I get over? What do I do?" And the answer is not to learn more about halal and haram. That doesn't change anything. What changes everything is your conviction in the. I have to live my life for a deeper purpose than my pleasure. I have to live my life for something deeper than, than just square footage of a house, recognition and clout. When that really hits you, your life completely changes. And so this conversation that we're having right now and these talks throughout the last 10 days, if you take this serious, this can be the thing that transforms you completely. Omar, he used to say something really deep because Omar had a lot of clout before Islam. He had clout. He had influence. He was a baller. He had everything. But he said something deep. This, this, it always hits me. He says, "Whoever truly fears Allah, they never truly let out their anger." And whoever really knows Allah, they don't just do anything. And this is the part that hits me. He says, "If it wasn't for the reality of the Day of Judgment sitting in front of me, I'd be a different man than I am. I'd be a different woman than I am." But what changed Omar from this influential man that had all the dunya at his disposal? What changed him? He says, "It's the Day of Judgment, man." And here we are looking at these verses today. And, and these verses are heavy because what's happening is Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala is telling us in the Quran about a conversation that's going to take place. Here we are in the dunya. It hasn't happened for us yet. But Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala is saying, "Let me give you a glimpse into the future." And here's the question as I, as he read the verses, the question that I had for myself is, "Where will I be when this conversation takes place? Where, where am I at in this conversation?" What does the conversation say? Let's go through it verse by verse. Heavy, heavy. Really heavy. Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says that these two groups, Jannah, the people in Jannah are there, and the people of hellfire are there. Both of them looking back at their lives, remember everything that they went through, all the grinding, all the fasting, all the standing in prayer, where we could have been anywhere on a on a Friday night, many of us in a life before we were other places on a Friday night, but Allah has blessed us to be here right now. So they'll speak to each other. And the question when you're hearing this is, "Where will I be when this conversation takes place? Where am I at? Where's Miko going to be?" Because for me, Mikao, I've lived through different phases where from, from, from, from, you know, 16 to 19, yo, I know where I would have been. And then for a little bit, Allah has guided me to this path. But here's the thing that none of us truly know. We, we don't know our outcome, man. So when we ask Allah, "Oh Allah, make me from the people of Jannah." You can't sit here and think, "Oh, I'm already a Muslim. I'm good." Yo, because as Sheikh said at the end, the thing that hit me is the thing he said at the end that when they looked at the people of hellfire, Allah described them as people that took their religion as a joke. And I'm thinking about myself. How often do I take my religion as just a joke? I'm culturally a Muslim because it makes me fit into the, everyone else. It makes me fit into my family, but is it really embedded in my heart?

So let's look at this conversation. Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says the people of Jannah, yo, they're, they're blinged out. I saw, I walked in, I saw a man with a nice watch on. I was like, "Yo, it's reminding me of Jannah right there, bro. Where he at? Yo, Jannah is real. You got your jewelry on. The things the men couldn't wear in the dunya, we're rocking it on. Yo, the drip, the clothes, silk. We can't, men, we can't. It's oppressive. We can't wear silk. You know what I mean? We can't wear silk, man. But in Jannah, everything you could imagine. You don't got to get the lineup every other week, right?" My man was like, "Yes." You know what I mean? Like, like imagine your Jannah. What is your Jannah like? Because you have to build your Jannah. Right now is where you build that Jannah. That Jannah when the Prophet met Abraham, and Isma'il, Ibrahim dabbed him up. He said, "I want you to tell your ummah something." He said, "What?" "Oh Abraham, what do you want me to tell my ummah?" Abraham said, "Tell your ummah, I say, salam first." So Abraham said salam to all of us. But then he said, "Tell them that Jannah is, is barren. They have to plant their own trees." With SubhanAllah, Alhamdulillah, every SubhanAllah, a tree in Jannah. Every Allahu Akbar, a tree in Jannah. Every, every, a tree in Jannah. You got to build your Jannah. Now, so the Jannah people in Jannah, they're, they're already faces glowing. No Korean stuff for their face. It's all good. Y'all brothers don't even know about the Korean stuff. Yo, that Korean be having that glass. You know what I mean? Like, whatever. Yo, my wife be telling me, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. My wife told me about it. >> Face is shining, beautiful, glowing. The hadith says that every time you come back to your spouse, he or she looks at you and says, "Oo, you look so much better today." In the opposite, yo, every time you go to wifey, she'll be like, "Yo, you gaining weight, bro. What you doing?" Y So, so every time you go back to wifey, she looks at you, she goes, "How'd you glow up today? What happened?" Allah says, "You enter into Jannah?" This is crazy. Some of y'all heard me say this before, but I got to repeat it. My favorite verse about Jannah is, "We'll enter them into Jannah, but they already know where everything is." That means when you walk into Jannah, it's not strange to you. You already know because it's your home. Man, you ever feel like in the dunya, I don't fit in? How many times you get that like weird like existential moment where you're like, "Yo, dunya is whack. Yo, I don't even know if I'm really supposed to be here." You're not. Your home is waiting for you.

So the people of Jannah, they'll call out. So, so that means Allah makes it so that the people of Jannah can actually communicate with the people of hellfire so that we can recognize the blessing we have. First thing that they say, heavy verse, the first thing they say is, "Man, everything God promised us is true. Everything God promised us is true. The house is in Jannah, the rivers in Jannah, the family in Jannah, the, the servants in Jannah, the, everything that your heart." SubhanAllah, I had a, a friend of mine, we used to sit and talk about Jannah. You know what he used to say? He used to say, "Sheikh, we weren't, we weren't Sheikh back then, man. But he used to be like, 'Bro, wherever your imagination ends, that's where Jannah begins. That's where Jannah begins.'" So Jannah are calling to the. Why? Because these were the people that ridiculed me. Even if they were Muslim, bro, I'm going to, bro, you still do that stuff, bro? Yo, I'm going to the Haka, bro. Come on, man. Like, for real. The ones that mock you because you're extra religious in Ramadan. You know who I'm talking about. May Allah make us not like them. And may Allah guide our family and our friends that we truly pray for. May Allah guide them. May Allah guide them. The hadith says one righteous person from a family could bring the whole family to Jannah. Maybe Allah selected you to put the work in for the family on the Day of Judgment. Whole family gonna be looking up to you. And that we see is true. It's true. Y'all right now, we have doubts. We all, everyone, we all have doubts. But Allah is telling us the day will come where you'll be in Jannah and you'll say, "Yo, it's true." Just put yourself there. Yo, it's true. All of it. And then they ask a question to the other side of the room. "Is it true over there too? Is the punishment over there true? Is the distance from God and no mercy true? Is the pain that you're feeling, is that true? Is that real?" They know the answer, but it's a rhetorical question. And it's a question I feel like it's for us who's still living. Why else would God tell us about this conversation that's going to happen? And then Allah says that the people in hellfire, may Allah protect us, they have only one thing they could say. They say, "Yeah, it's true. Everything that you read about, everything your prophet said would happen in hellfire is true. All of the punishment, all of the agony, all of the distance from God's mercy, all of the remorse." Man, can you imagine the remorse when you look back at your life and the time you spent just wasted and you look back and say, "I had a chance. I had a chance." Every day you wake up is a new chance to gain Jannah. So all they can say is, "Yes." And then Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala then moves on. Sheikh, you want to reflect on that verse? I'm going to go to that next. But before I go there, maybe, you know, there's one very fascinating thing that some of the scholars of Tafsir have pointed out when they're asked this question that, "We found the people of paradise are saying, 'What Allah promised us, we found it to be 100% true.' Did you also find the warning that Allah gave you that that is also true?" They'll say, they will confirm. And that seems like just a very quick kind of like detail, just two words, they'll say, "Yes." They respond, "Yes." But understand what that represents. That is the people in hellfire, in one word, one word, three letters, in one word, confirming, verifying, attesting, testifying to the truth and verifying their belief in the truth. What's that mean? Understand what that means. What that means is every single human being, let's just use the Quran as as a symbol of that. What Allah is telling us in the Quran, every single human being one day or another will believe in this. You understand what that means? Islam, Allah, Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam, Quran, every single human being will one day believe in this, confirm this. The question is not about whether somebody believes or doesn't believe. No, no, no. That's a delusion. That's a delusion. Allah is telling us the future. Allah is telling us eventually, when everything is said and done, every single, 100% of human beings that ever existed throughout time and space, they will have accepted this. They will have believed this. The question is, when? When? See, and I don't want to go too much into the weeds and that also kind of becomes confusing for people. But in theology, right, it's a technical field, theology, something we studied for decades and decades and we teach and, but theologically speaking, we understand that there are some things that are not, we have not been given control of. Allah has maintained total control of those things. And then in some things, Allah has allowed us, we call it free will. Free will and choice. Some things Allah is telling us in the Quran, whether eventually, at the end of the day, whether someone, whether anyone believes or does not believe, that actually Allah has kept in His hands and He's saying, "Eventually everyone will believe." The free choice, the free will is in terms of when. So either you believe in it now where it can have some benefit, where it can serve you. If we believe now, if I believe now, it becomes a proof for me. But Allah protect us all. If I don't believe now, I will be forced to accept it in the afterlife and then it will be, >> there will be a proof and an evidence against us. >> Can I add something, Sheikh? What you just said is profound. You know why? As you said, SubhanAllah, it's saying that one day everyone will believe, right? But when you said, "Right now I have a choice." This room, the average age is like young. You know what I mean? Me and you are unc to them. You know what I mean? >> You know what I mean? I heard unc stood for uncool. Is that true? >> No. Okay. >> Yunk. Oo. Oh, yunk. Yo, I'mma start using that. Nah. You know what this tells me? Are you going to wait until you're in your 40s and 50s to actually believe? Or are you going to take the opportunity right now when you're young, when you have strength in your legs and strength in your back and, and you have the ability to stay up and fast? Do you realize a day is going to come when your son's going to have to tell you, "Baba, you can't fast anymore. Mama, you can't fast no more." Some of y'all have elderly parents. You got to tell them, "Your sugar's too high. Dad, you can't fast." And your dad is looking at you like, "I want to fast." And you're like, "Dad, you can't." Can you imagine a day is going to come when you can't? So when you said, "You either do it now or later," I'm thinking, even for us, man, when are you going to take deen seriously? Are you waiting for that 40 years old, 50 years old? First of all, it might not come. It might not come. Two years ago, our brother Hadi, man, he passed away. Motorcycle accident. But my man used to come to every Haka, man. Every Haka. His dad at the janazah said, "Man, Hadi's biggest complaint was, 'Baba, there's too many Haka's on Tuesday night. I don't know which one to hit up. I don't know which one to hit up.'" Hadi made a choice at a young age that now's the time to believe in the. So, so as you said that, Sheikh, I was just thinking, we keep saying tomorrow. Let me grind right now. Let me, let me, let me, you know, build my assets right now. Let me build my influence. I'll pray Fajr five years from now. I'll stop the addictions. Five years from now, man. Five years from now is going to turn into 40 years from now because as you get older, you still think you're young. That's me. You know me and you. You know what I mean? It's like >> I, I know exactly how old I am, brother. That's you. That's all you. >> Yo, it's creeping, bro. It's creeping, bro. >> I like it, though. I like it, though. >> No, I, I just want us to all ask ourselves a question. Ask yourself a question. Are you waiting? Is it now? Is now the time for me to start living my life with conviction and the or am I pushing that off? Am I pushing that off? Because the only difference is that those people in this verse just pushed it off too long. They just pushed it off too long and death came. There's somebody in that group that was like, "I was just about to get on the deen." There's somebody in that group. "I was just about to, I was just about to close the practice and then, you know, I change and move to Medina. I was just about to change my life." So the, so when you read that, I just wanted to reflect on that. Now or are you pushing it off? I read something so profound that it said, "Most of the people of hellfire, they regret one word: sofa." Let me translate. The biggest regret in hellfire. Like, if you were to take a data, like, gain, gather data, do a survey of the people of hellfire. This hadith says that if we gather data on the people of hellfire, the biggest regret is that they said, "I used to say, 'I'll do it later.'" >> Yeah. The, the classical Arabic, ancient Arabic, classical Arabic that the Quran is revealed in, um, is such a fascinating language. It's so remarkable. The word for procrastination in classical Arabic is, which is a derivative of sofa. >> They've, they turned it into a verb because sofa means eventually. >> Later. >> Later. "I'll get to it soon enough. I'll get there. I'll get there. Just in a little bit. In a little bit. In a little bit." And they made a verb out of it called tasawwuf. And they call that procrastination. So it's so fascinating. >> Yeah. That's profound. Let's go forward to the next. Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala then brings this idea of what we could equate to a purgatory in the biblical sense. And what it is is there's these people whose deeds got them right in the middle. Right in the middle. And as I read this verse, my first thought is, "Oh Allah, let me give me the ability to put in work so I don't have to be in that middle right now." Like, like right now, I'm not trying to be in the middle. So, oh Allah, enable me to put in that work so I'm not in this situation. But here again, the question is, "Where will I be standing?" Allah says, "In between the people of heaven and hell, there's a barrier between." And on that barrier, there are these men and women whose deeds were equal. The good and the bad equaled out. So just on the strength of deeds, they're in neither side. Just on the strength of deeds, they're on neither side. They're right in the middle. But all they have left is their hope and mercy and, and in God's mercy. That's it. That's all they have left. That's all they have left. But Allah explains what's happening while they're in the middle. Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says they're looking at both sides and they don't know. You know, you get the, the email from the school you applied to and before you open it, you don't know what's your heart feel like. Do you gather the family around to look at it or is it going to be embarrassing? You get the email back from the employer you were trying to get a job with. What's that anxiety like? I want you to put yourself in that moment where you applied for something and you were right at the cusp of getting the reply. What was the anxiety like? What was the fear like? What were the thoughts racing in your mind? That's for a job that may last 10 years. Imagine for eternity into heaven or hell for a job that may last 10 to 15 years. The anxiety that you get. Why? Because you know my life will be this much better if I get the gig and my life will be a little bit harder if I don't get the gig. That amount of change in your state has you sweating bullets, man. Sweating bullets when you open that email. Correct. Now imagine you're standing at this place where the decision is for your eternity. Yo, eternity. This is not a 10-year job. This is not a 20-year job. This is my eternal abode. This is my eternal abode. And so they're sitting at this place not knowing which way is the outcome. And Allah says, "What do they do?" First thing they do is they look to the right side. And they could see the people of Jannah glowing. They could see the, no. They could see the bliss. They could see the party. They could see the drip. They could see the jewelry. They could see everything of Jannah. Can I share the hadith of the tree, Sheikh? Allah says, "Bear with me." Oh, this hadith is so real. Said, "I know the last man that will be pulled out of hellfire." The Sahabah are listening. "Ya Allah, tell us more." He said, "There will be a man that is right at the gates of hell. He's stuck inside. And he will say, 'Yi, I've been in this too long. I've been in this too long. Just take me right on the outskirts of the hell, please.'" Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala will say to this man, "If I give you that, you're going to want more." He says, "Wallah, I swear by you, Allah. The only thing that I want is to be out of this hellfire. Just to be out, just outside of it. That's all I want. And I won't ask for anything else." Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says, "You have it now." And he puts him on the outside of it, of of hellfire. He's there. He's there as long as, as long as Allah wills. But in the distance, on the horizon, he could see a beautiful tree with colors that are not on the spectrum of our reality. And he can see the comfort under that tree, the water under the tree, the fruit of the tree. And he says, "Ya Allah, I was wondering, would you mind just letting me be under that tree?" Allah says, "But if, if, if I give you that tree, you're going to want more." And he says, "Wallah, I swear to you, God, if you just let me be under the tree, that's all I, that's all I want." Now, I want to pause here. How many of us in this room, we said, "Oh Allah, if you give me that job, I'll be good." The moment you got a job, two years later, you're trying to get a new joint. "If I become a dentist, I'm good." My man's with me right now. You got it. He gave it to you. But the moment you got it, two years, three years, maybe five, you're like, "I need my own practice." Sah, this is everyone. I'm not picking on you. This is all of us. Habibi. That's my boy. No, this is all of us. You got the practice. Allah gave it to you. Then what happened? Three years later, I got to do something different. I need something. This is our nature. So Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says to him, "Go to the tree." He's under the tree. He has the water that's flowing. He has the fruits of this tree. He's hearing the music of this tree. Allah says that the trees of Jannah, when the wind blows, you'll hear music you never heard before. You ever hear like a symphony and get, nah, never mind, it's Ramadan. Like, you ever, I can't, man, y'all don't keep it real and we're recording, but back in my Jahiliyyah, there we go. Back in my Jahiliyyah, sometimes you would hear something and it's like the hairs would stand up. You're like, "That's brilliant. That's brilliant. The sound of that is brilliant." Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says that the music of Jannah is like no ear has ever heard before. So he's under this tree enjoying the music of the tree, enjoying the water of the tree, enjoying the shade of the tree. And from that tree, he could see the gates of Jannah. Through the gates, he could see people walking past. He could see people dabbing each other up. He could see the glow. And y'all know what he does next? He says, "Ya Allah, can I just sit next to Jannah? Can I just sit next to Jannah?" Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala repeats the previous conversation. And at this point, Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala gives him what he already planned for him. He said, "Enough with the games, my 'abd. I want you to enter into Jannah and you will have a Jannah 10 times the size of the heavens and the earth that you existed in before." The man says, he says, "Ya Allah, why are you picking on me and you, Allah? Why are you picking on me?" Meaning, how are you going to give me that much? I just came from the hellfire and you're telling me I'm going to get 10 times the heavens and the earth of the dunya. And Allah says, "There's no games. Enter into your Jannah." And he enters into that Jannah. The narration says when a person comes out of hellfire, there's a river right at the front gate called. And Allah says, "Wait, hold on. You can't go into Jannah with the scars you have from Jahannam. You can't go into Jannah with the smell and the stench that you have from hellfire. You can't go in there with the burns." And that's, that's, you can't walk in here. You ever go to a nice restaurant, come with your flyest joint, and they're like, "Oh, you don't have a, you can't come in with that. You can't." I ain't never been there. I saw movies. Oh, okay. Yo, Sheikh, always, ever since I came to Kalam like nine years ago, Sheikh's always been mashallah, man. Say mashallah. Mashallah. He got me on point. My wife was like, "Why don't you dress like Abdul Nash?" I was like, "Yo, relax. Yo, relax." Okay. So Allah says, "You can't enter into Jannah with that smell of Jahannam, with those clothes of Jahannam. Dive into the river of life." And the man dives into the river of life. The sister dives into the river of life. And when she comes out the other side of the shore, she's glowing. He's glowing. And now Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says, "Enter in. Enter in." My, my point in narrating this is this, these people are standing at the top and they're looking to the side and they see these people of Jannah and they're saying, "Notice the first thing they say is 'alaykum. Hey, yo, 'alaykum." When I first became Muslim, man, I, I used to see a hijabi from like across the street and say, 'alaykum. I didn't know. I didn't know. She'd be like, "Yo, head down." I'm a new Muslim. Like, I see representation of Islam. I'm like, "Yo, right." So the first thing that these people say is, "Our call sign." Like, our salam is like a call sign. You could be anywhere in the world. If somebody drops salam on you, you're like, "Oh, okay." You know what I mean? Like, connection. They'll look to the right side and see the people of Jannah. Listen, y'all, in order to train, change, let these verses change you. You have to see it. It's not theoretic. You have to be there. As I explain the verses, put yourself there. So they're standing on this barrier in between and they look to the right side and they can see the Jannah. So they look at the people because they see people they know, the same people from here. Like, "Yo, don't you remember me? It's me. I used to pray Tarawih with you. I used to fast with you. I used to, I used to be with you in the dunya, but I got caught up and I'm not with you right now." So they'll say, "As-salamu alaykum." Yo, that's scary, man. That the same crew that I hang out with, they could be in Jannah and I'm stuck in the middle. We got to change now. Tonight's the night you change, man. Tonight's the night you realize. You say, "Ya Allah, I feel Jannah is real. Ya Allah, transform me. Transform me before I get up from this spot. Ya Allah, before I stand up from this spot, change me, Ya Allah. I've heard this lecture. It hit me. I feel it. I don't want to be on the barrier and I don't want to be on the other side. Change me tonight, Ya Allah." And I don't care what sin you're addicted to, what, what, what issue you have. Some of the greatest scholars of our ummah and awliya of Allah, they changed in the middle of the crime. Abdullah, Abdullah bin Mubarak, all of these great, SubhanAllah, was on his way to kill the Prophet and he found Allah. So I don't care what your trouble is. It's easy for God to change your state. You just got to want it enough. They look to the left, right side. They say, "As-salamu alaykum." And then Allah says, "They haven't entered, but their hearts are hopeful." You, you want to hope. Never lose hope.

>> Yeah. And it, it's quite fascinating because this conversation about the people that are caught in the middle, >> you know, theoretically, when you think about that, as she was explaining previously, that, you know, when someone is doesn't have a passing grade but isn't quite failing, they're just right on the edge, right? Logically, conventional logic is that if somebody's kind of caught in the middle, then it can go either way. >> If something's kind of teetering, it can tip over to either side. That's conventional logic. But we're talking about the hereafter. The hereafter is above and beyond any kind of parameters, rules, restrictions, confinements of this dunya. It's totally different. And the rule of the, the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam told us, informed us about what is the rule of the, the hereafter. In a hadith, when the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam went on the most miraculous night journey, where he went from Makkah to Jerusalem and then Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala took him above the heavens and he went to the point where no creation has gone before, Maha. He says, one of the things that he brought back from there was, he said that, "I saw an inscription on the throne of God. I saw something written on the Arsh of Allah." And what was written there? That it was written, Allah said, "My, my mercy, it dominates my wrath. My mercy dominates my wrath. Allah's mercy is greater than His wrath." And so the rule actually is, all of these folks, all of these people that are caught in the middle, that are in purgatory, they will all end up in paradise because that's Allah's promise. That's Allah's promise. And that is represented here by the fact that they never lost hope in the mercy of Allah because they knew, they remembered that Allah told us even in the life of the world, the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam informed us that Allah has proclaimed, Allah has declared, and they will probably see it there on the Day of Judgment, written on the throne of Allah, that "My mercy overcomes my wrath." That's the mercy of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. It always wins. "My mercy encompasses everything." And so that's why they're still hopeful on that day in the mercy of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. And that is their salvation. That's actually their salvation. That's the secret to iman. That's the secret to faith. I was referencing theology and, and all of that earlier. That's not, not in its detail. That's not a requirement for every single person to know, like, in-depth Islamic philosophy and all these theological debates and arguments and all that. No, no, no. What the secret to iman, the secret to faith, the secret to surviving this world, the secret to succeeding in the life of the hereafter is the mercy of Allah. Never let go of the mercy of Allah. Always believe in the mercy of Allah. Cling to the mercy of Allah. Hold to the mercy of Allah. Remind yourself of the mercy of Allah day and night, morning and evening. And as long as we can do that, that's a dua of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam. Say it. Say it till you believe it. Imazali says, "When the tongue says something a thousand times, the heart says it once." So every day, say, "Oh Allah, I hope for Your mercy. I hope for Your mercy. I hope for Your mercy. I cling to Your mercy. I hold on to Your mercy." And just repeat that every single day, morning and evening, for the rest of your life. And may Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala grant us His mercy. Can, can I add to that? Yo, listen, Sheikh. A lot of us learned the religion from a young age based on God's anger. Why do you have to pray? Allah's going to get angry. Flexing, yo. Flexing, yo. Like how a lot of us learned religion in a way that God's going to get angry with you. We were taught to pray, why? Allah's going to get angry at you. Fast. Why? Mom, why should I fast? Allah's going to get angry at you. Allah's going to get angry. He's going to punish you. So the way, what that did is that created within us, listen closely, I need us to understand this about ourselves. That created us in us this image of God that is one that he's just waiting for me to slip up so he could punish me. Vengeful. You know, the, the, the boss that doesn't really care about your well-being. They're just waiting for you to make a mistake. You ever work for someone like that? And then you had the boss that was like, "No, you'll make mistakes, but I'm here to make things easier for you. And if you make a mistake, I got you." What I want us to understand is you need to reprogram yourself. Because many of your parents, they learned a wrathful God. That's how they were taught religion. That God is just angry, waiting, waiting, waiting to punish you. I often say when someone says, "God is watching," y'all, I said this last Haka, but I have to repeat it. God isn't watching you because he's waiting for you to mess up. God is watching the way you watch a newborn baby. When you have a baby and the baby's sleeping, you can't take your eyes off the baby. Why? I can't stop watching you because I love you. God is watching you not because he's waiting for you to slip up. God can't take his eyes off you because you are His prized creation. Allah loves you. And if you realize that God loves you, the pain of hell is even more. If you realize how much Allah loves you and that He is the source of love and that all of this prayer, all of this fasting is just to say, "Ya Allah, I love You. I'm trying to show You I love You and I know You love me." Shift this relationship from one of anger to one of pure love. The biggest punishment of hellfire is not the fire. It's the distance from the source of love. That, that's the biggest punishment, that I'm distant from the source of all love. Tonight for the, we were talking about, you know, being frustrated with your dua. >> It's a different topic. It's all always related, but it's a little bit of a different topic. But there's the.

One quote that I shared from Josie that kind of fits in with this idea that you're talking about, the mercy and the love that Allah has for us. He says in that quote that sometimes Allah subhana wa ta'ala does not give us the exact thing that we are asking for, even though we're praying for it. We're making dua to to prolong because Allah wants you to talk to him more. Like, even when Allah is quote unquote not giving you what you want or what you need, even in that is love because Allah subhana wa ta is saying, "Stay a little longer and keep talking to me." There's so much love in everything Allah does for us. There is love.

The, the example I, I got this question two weeks ago. Somebody heard me, I was talking about Allah's love and they said, "I can't reconcile something. How do you say Allah loves me so much when there's so many duas that haven't been answered of mine?" That's what someone asked. How, how do you reconcile that? And I said, "I love my son. He's outside. He ain't listening." You don't got to repeat this to him. I love my son, but my man keeps asking for the Pokemon Rip joints. Oh, you have no idea. All right. It's like gambling, lowkey. They're trying to hook our, they're trying to hook our kids young, bro. So, he keeps asking for these rip packs. Okay. Basically, shake, you know, you, you open the pack, you might get a good card, you might not. All right, cool. It's a waste of money. Yeah, he keeps asking. At some point, I have to say no. Now, everyone here knows I love him, but it is my love for him that is telling me to say no at this point. It is my love that's not giving him what he wants because I know that at that age, everything he wants isn't good for him.

Now, I want you to look at yourself. How many things you asked for that if you had gotten it, you would have been messed up. And it was God's mercy that he didn't give to you. That God's mercy that he didn't give to you. You thought shorty would have been a good, you know what I mean? She married your cousin. Two years later, divorce. Now you like, "Alhamdulillah." I'm just trying to give an example. Was it too cringe? Too cringe. Okay, whatever. It must have resonated. All I'm saying, all I'm saying is it doesn't mean I don't love that I don't give him something. Am I holding back? In fact, I've heard children say that the fact that my dad gave me everything I wanted showed me he didn't even care about me. When he gave me everything, that told me in later in life, he didn't even care. He'd buy what you want. What am I trying to say? You have to learn how to see God's love for you even when he holds back from you because that is love, too. And if you think the only type of love is when he gives you what you ask for, you're spiritually immature. That's all. And tonight, we mature up. You're thinking the way my 8-year-old thinks. "You hate me." No, I love you and you'll realize it later.

And so, all I want to say is if you've struggled in life and you're sitting here saying, "Shake, you say God loves me." But you, you, you don't know. All I'm going to say is when you look back, you'll realize that that story God gave you was the best story for you and that made you so great. That made you who you are today. So, I just want us to understand that a lot of us, this mentality is, "God hates me. He's angry with me." But I want us to shift that tonight to, "God loves me." And if God loves me now, I stand up in prayer for a different reason. Not because I'm, I'm scared only you're going to punish me. I'm standing up because I want you to know how much I love you, too.

Let's go forward to the next part of the verse. How we are on time. Very simply put, once again, when these people that are stuck in the middle, as we said in the translation, when they look at the people in hellfire, at that time, they're making dua, they're praying, they're begging, they're saying, they're praying, they're asking, "Oh Allah, just don't put me with those people. I see that they were wrong. I see what they did was wrong. They made the wrong choices. They were corrupt. Oh Allah, don't put me with them." And again, it's the same point. It's just a matter of us. We're here having this conversation. This is such a profound blessing of Allah that we are sitting here right now in this life, while we are still alive. And this is where we put in the work. There is where we reap the rewards or the harms, the consequences. Imam Ali called it, this is the field where we cultivate what we will reap. Deep in the hereafter, that we're having this conversation now, that we're reading these verses now, that we're understanding these ayat right now, because we can have this conviction today. I can decide today, "Oh Allah, I don't want to be on the wrong side of things. I don't want to be that kind of a person who defies you, who disobeys you belligerently, blatantly, stubbornly, arrogantly, intentionally, over and over again, repeatedly." We all make mistakes. But there's a difference between somebody slipping up, an honest mistake, because the error is human, versus somebody just bullishly just ramming their head against the command of Allah. The order, the command of Allah. And we can identify that right now. Let this be our dua here tonight. "Oh Allah, do not make us amongst those who defy you." Say amen. Amen.

You know what I think about, Sheikh, with this one is, I, I remember times in my life where I was surrounded by people that were the worst of people. And then when I met Muslims and I interacted with Muslims and accepted Islam 20 years ago, I met these people that were gentle, caring. Like when I read this verse, "Oh Allah, they look to the left side." Just bear with me. Put yourself there again, okay? They're in the middle. They look to the right. They saw the believers. They said salam to them. And now they look to the left. Now, I want you to focus on who's on the left. They see the, I don't even want to say these shaitans' names, but I want you to think about the people of this dunya that are bombing people and hurting people and oppressing people and and and harassing people and and think of those those vile people that live like demons, man. Live like demons. I've seen these people. I've, I've actually been with these people. So, they look over there and they're thinking, "I don't want to be with those people." Like, how can I be in the same place where Abu Jahal is? How can I be in the same place that certain leaders of oppressive countries are? Can you imagine that? At the end of the day, you're sitting next to that person. Look at those people and ask yourself, "Do I want to be with those people?" I don't want to be with them in the. What I was trying to say is in the, I don't feel safe around them. Imagine in hellfire, man. In the, I didn't feel safe. They could rob me any time, set me up, whatever. The, the dunya is crazy. But I just, in my mind, what I'm saying is look at those people on that left side and ask yourself, "Do I want to be with those people?" I don't even feel comfortable in the world with them. Ya Allah, I don't want to be with them in the. And so to me, this dua really, really just highlights, look at that group of people. Do you really want to live your life and be with them?

And the, there's one more verse I want to move on to, which is powerful. It's the final dua, you could say, that the people of hellfire make to the people of Jannah. The tables are turned, y'all. The people of Jannah, the people of hellfire are now asking something from the people of Jannah. And what do they say? And the tables are turned. The third world ain't the third world no more, if you get my drift. The first world ain't the first world no more. Right now, the first world is what gets all the goods of this dunya and the third world gets the scraps. But in the, it's switched over. So the people of hellfire, they, they can sense and see what's happening in Jannah and they say to the people of Jannah, "Can we have some water or anything that God has given you?" Be, you know what's crazy about the anything? They say this because they don't actually know all of the blessings that we have up there. So they say water because water is the only thing they remember from. So they say, "Can we have some water?" But then they switch it. They go, "Oh, or whatever God has given you in Jannah. Can we just get some of it?" And notice what the people of Jannah say. Look at the word they use. They say, "Nah, it's haram." Yo, subhan Allah. We lived our lives on haram. Halal. Somebody handed you something that you shouldn't drink and you said, "No, I, I can't drink that. That's haram." Dude's like, "What language you speaking?" You're like, "Sorry, I don't do that. It's haram." See, we lived by haram in this world. And the, the only one prohibited from someone is the one that didn't prohibit themselves from something in the dunya. Do you understand that message? That's profound. They, the people of Jannah, they say, "No, we can't give it to you. It's haram. It's haram for you to have." And my point is, God doesn't make things haram just to make it so that we can't have it. He wants you to have the purest form of it in Jannah. The purest form of it in Jannah. So to me, what sticks out to me is when they say, "That's beautiful." You know, Imam Ibn Kathir, one of the great commentators on the Quran, he actually says that them begging for water, again, not to get too nerdy, but it just means like a little bit, like a drop of water. Them begging for a drop of water is, he describes it as maybe the most painful scene in the entire Quran. And he says that the people who trampled this whole dunya, trampled everyone on this dunya, walked around like they owned the place, like Allah describes the Pharaoh as he thought he owned the place. The people who stomped around like they owned the place, trampled everything in their way and everyone in their way are reduced to the point of begging for a single drop of water. That's it. That's it. They're reduced to begging for a single drop of water. And that's very, very humbling. And it's that same point that Sheikh just mentioned right now. If I don't respect the line of halal and haram, just respect it. Again, we're not, we haven't been talking about perfection throughout these nights, but respecting it means you catch yourself when you did it wrong. You repent, you fix it, etc. You try to be good, you try to do right. But if I don't respect the line of halal and haram in this world, then I am in effect making haram on myself the blessings of the hereafter. But if I can have the little bit of discipline to stay away from like the five things that Allah subhana wa ta'ala has made haram in this world, then there's no limit to my enjoyment in the hereafter. And similarly here, if I can humble myself in this dunya, I can admit when I'm wrong, I can put my face on the ground in front of Allah. If I can eat a little slice of humble pie in this world, then I have nothing but honor and elevation in the life of the hereafter. My Lord honored me. But if I was unwilling to humble myself in this dunya, "No. Uh, I didn't do nothing wrong. That doesn't make any sense. I don't know what you're talking about. I disagree." Uh, actually, if you think about it, and I were talking about this as well, that that kind of mentality that if that's how I want to live my life, man, subhan Allah, Allah subhana wa ta'ala, may Allah protect us. Allah will humble that person to the point, humiliate, debase that person to the point where that person is begging for one single drop of water and will be deprived of that. May Allah protect us.

So, we have gone on long enough. Um, we got a little bit off schedule today because alhamdulillah, just, we're getting close to the completion of the Quran and, you know, so we had a little bit more to recite tonight, so we went a little bit longer. The program started a little bit later and this is just one of those nights, you know, blessed nights of Ramadan. And, um, to put it in, um, Sheikh Mika'il's vernacular, sometimes you're just feeling it. Yeah. Right. Y'all feel y'all feel him? Yes. Yes. Okay. Now he can go home. I can go home. Once you're feeling me, I'm good. Good. So, uh, we apologize for the delay, but alhamdulillah, it was more time spent in the remembrance of Allah. May Allah subhana wa ta'ala gather us in the afterlife together in paradise. Amen. And we will remember this gathering. Amen. We have some very important announcements. I need everyone to just stay still for a second. Stay seated just for a second. I know. I know this is for your own sake. I promise this is for your good. All right, Jac. Okay. So, basically, the, we have a lot of people in the building right now and the easiest way for everyone to get to where