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Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

By: Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center
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 We came to give, not to take. Islam Spirituality
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  • Find a problem to solve – #1

    Find a problem to solve – #1
    Dec 20 2025
    Auto-generated transcript:Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen. Wa salatu wa salamu ala ashrafil amliya wal kursaleed. Muhammadur Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallam. Tasliman kathiran kathiran. From Abadu, my brothers and sisters, the secret of success in life, whether you are an entrepreneur in a business or whether you are an individual doing something on your own, the secret is very simple. Find a problem, solve it, scale your solution, monetize it if you want to. Fourth step. Find a problem, solve it, scale it, and if you want to, if you want to monetize it, monetize it. Make money from it. The Nigerian billionaire and car manufacturer, Innocent Efediaso Chukwuma. I love African names, it's so musical. And a friend of mine said to me, anything which has three syllables is musical. So Innocent Efediaso Chukwuma. In the 19th, 1980s, every businessman in Niniaibi, in Nigeria, was importing motorcycles from Japan and China. They imported them whole, which is fully assembled. Because a motorcycle is bulky, however, a 40-foot container could only hold about 40 motorcycles. This made the landing cost very high. Innocent Chukwuma looked at this and he said, why are we shipping air? I want you to remember this statement. Why are we shipping air? Because this applies not only to shipping, it applies to a lot of things in life. Why are we shipping air? So he instead imported disassembled bikes and then reassembled them in Nigeria and sold them. Now disassembled, you could get 200 bikes in the same container, same 40-foot container. Now while competitors were selling motorcycles for, you know, 150,000 Naira, Innocent started selling for 80,000 Naira. And he was still making a profit. Now once he started assembling bikes locally, he realized that he was buying a lot of plastic parts from outside. Again, he did the math. He said, why import plastic when I can melt it here? So same thing. Why are we shipping air? He opened a plastics factory to feed his motorcycle assembly. That same plastics factory later allowed him to start making car dashboards and bumpers. That's where he started in his car manufacturing business. He didn't wake up one day and build a car plant. He built the components first. Then the car followed. Now many, this happens all the time in all sorts of things. Because many of us, many of us, we are losing money. We are losing time. We are losing opportunity. Because we are shipping air. So the thing to ask yourself is, where in my business, where am I in my life? Am I shipping air? Right? Because if you are, if you are doing something, any process, which does not give you a direct return, then that is shipping air. So think about this and ask yourself, where in my life am I shipping air? And you will find out. In India also, we have several great examples of this, of the principle that I mentioned to you, which is find a problem, solve it, scale your solution and monetize it. If you want to monetize. And that is this company called Urban Company. Now, Urban Company guys, is a classic example of find a problem, solve it, scale it, scale your solution and monetize it. All of us had these problems and we still have these problems. At home, the kitchen sink leaks, the bathroom flush tank, something happens. You want to put a nail in a pipe, you want to put a nail in a place in a wall to hang a picture. But if you simply take a nail and a hammer and you start hammering, then a whole chunk of plaster falls down and now you have an ugly hole in the wall. Your table, your chair, something is loose, it needs to be fixed. You need a carpenter. So you need a carpenter, you need a plumber, you need somebody to knock a nail in your wall. Maybe you need a haircut. And going to the saloon and all of that is a hassle and you wish that you could get a haircut, you could get a barber to come home and cut your hair, trim your beard, give you a pedicure, manicure or whatnot, a massage. Guess what? That's exactly what Urban Company hooked on to. So what they have is a whole bunch of professionals, who are dressed professionally, they are in a uniform. They have been, their antecedents and their background checks have been done. So when you book on the app, the service that you want, this professional then is assigned to you. He comes at a specific time, which you have specified. So according to your convenience, the price is, he doesn't come, he doesn't haggle. You don't have to talk to him. The price is already there on the app and you already have, you have paid the price for the service. He comes, he or she comes and they do the service and then they clean up after themselves and they leave. And all this is done in a very, very nice and efficient professional manner. Same thing, it's just a knocking and nailing a wall. But you are prepared to pay 200, 300, 500, whatever it is, whatever it is for that service, because you are getting that service at the time you want...
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  • Interest based Student loans are Haraam

    Interest based Student loans are Haraam
    Dec 19 2025
    Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honour of the prophets and messengers. Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and companions. Tasliman kathiran kathira. My brothers and sisters, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala reminds us about the purpose of our creation. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala reminds us about why He created us. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, وَمَا أَخَلَقْتُ الْجِنَّ وَالْإِنسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونَ مَا أُرِيدُ مِنْهُمْ بِالرِّزْقِ وَمَا أُرِيدُ أَن يُطْعِمُونَ إِنَّ اللَّهَ هُوَ الرَّزَّاقُ ذُو الْقُوَّةِ الْمَتِينَ Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, And I, Allah alone, created not the jinn and the humans except that they should worship me. That means, I have not created them for any purpose other than that they should worship me. I do not seek any provision from them, that is provision for themselves or for my creatures, nor do I ask that they should feed me, that is feed themselves or my creatures. Verily Allah is the All-Provider, the Owner of Power and Most Strong. If you look at the grammar of the last ayah, إِنَّ اللَّهَ هُوَ الرَّزَّاقُ ذُو الْقُوَّةِ الْمَتِينَ You will see that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has emphasized the fact that He is our Raziq six times. And finally in the last word of the ayah, He jalla jallahu invokes His own power, قُوَّةِ الْمَتِينَ to allay our anxiety about our sustenance. The issue is not His ability to provide but our faith. My brothers and sisters, my sisters, the thing to understand very clearly is that there can be no benefit in whatever Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala prohibited and there can be no harm in what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala permitted. This is the lesson that the Sahaba, Ridwanullahi alaihi majma'in, learned so well. They didn't try to balance anything. We talk about balance between deen and dunya. Deen is the way of living in the dunya. There's no question of balance. Deen is the way in which, according to which if we live in the dunya, then we will have a beautiful life in this world and in the hereafter. The Sahaba didn't balance anything. They simply chose to obey Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala without question. The only question they asked Rasulullah s.a.w., whenever a command of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala was revealed, was how should we do this? They never asked why should we do this? That is why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gave them control over their world. See the environment. I want to talk about one particular command of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, which is the banning of interest-based dealings. But before we go to the command, let's see the environment in which the command was given. The people of Makkah were mainly traders because Makkah has no industry or large-scale agriculture. They traded in the markets in Byzantium and Yemen, which were in Roman and Persian hands respectively. For this, they had a highly developed banking system, one of the mainstays of which was interest-based lending. They used various banking instruments, which had been in use in Roman Persia for a thousand years before Rasulullah s.a.w. was born. All the businessmen in Makkah were traders. Makkah used this system. And several, including al-Abbas bin Abdul Muttalib, and al-Anhu were bankers, with perhaps thousands of clients. It was in this context that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala prohibited the backbone of this whole system, which is interest-based lending and borrowing. Not only did Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala ban it, but he also declared war on the one who wouldn't leave it after the revelation of the ayah, after the ban. And neither did he offer an alternative to the system. Sometimes people ask this question and they say, if we leave this, what is the alternative? Give us the alternative first, then we will leave it. But that is not how the Sahaba saw it. They simply obeyed. So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala did not explain the reasons for the ban. He simply banned it. Allah said, يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا تَقُوا اللَّهَ وَذَرُوا مَا بَقِيَ مِنَ الرِّبَاءِ إِن كُنتُم مُؤْمِنِينَ فَإِن لَّمْ تَفْعَلُوا فَأَذَنُوا بِحَرْبٍ مِّنْ تَفْعَالُونَ Allah and His Messenger. And if you repent, then you will have the heads of your ancestors. Do not be wronged or be wronged. Allah said, O believers, fear Allah and give up outstanding interest if you are true believers. It's a conditional ayah. Prove that you are believers by giving up interest. If you are true believers. If you do not do this, then take a declaration of war with Allah and ...
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  • Salah is the pillar of my life

    Salah is the pillar of my life
    Dec 18 2025
    Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honour of the prophets and messengers. Muhammad and the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and companions. Peace be upon them all. And after that, my brothers and sisters, in life we have a principle, all of us. And that is that we value something based on that thing fulfilling its purpose. Everything has a purpose. The purpose of this chair is to provide a place for us to sit on. The purpose of this chair is not to be a table for us to eat off. You can still do it. That's not the purpose. Place to sit. If the chair stops performing this function, then there is no value for the chair. The purpose of this phone is to do some things, help us to communicate. If this phone goes dead, it happened to me. I had actually quite a new Android phone a few years ago. And one day it... went dead. Literally. I mean, it just became a brick. Then we asked the warrant... It was unfortunately, the warranty period also had just finished. And the only useful thing, if you can call it useful, is the guy tells me, Yeah, this happens. I said, okay, thank you very much. Phone is gone. Kalas. I had to buy a different phone, new phone. Now, point is, I spent money buying that phone, obviously. You know, whatever it was those days. 30,000, 40,000, whatever. Phone went dead. When the phone goes dead, it doesn't change its shape. It's the same phone. It just doesn't work. So, do you think I would have said, you know, okay, so I spent all this money on the phone. And even if it is not working, still I spent the money on the phone. And, you know, it's a nice phone. The time that it worked, it worked. For whatever, one year or something. So, let me just keep it. I'll keep the phone. Maybe put a chain and then hang it on my neck or something. Like a necklace. Will I do that? Will you do that? What would you do? It stopped performing. It stopped fulfilling its function. So, what do you do? You try to repair it. You take it to the shop, whatever, and say, can you repair it? And if you say, sorry, this cannot be repaired. It's finished. Then what do you do? You junk it. You throw it away. Right? The same principle applies in life throughout. Same principle for things. Same principle for relationships. You have an employee. You have a job. You have a job. You have a job. You have a job. You have a job. You have a job. You have an employee. You have employed him for a certain job. He doesn't come. He doesn't do the job. He does not do the job. And so on. So after a while what do you do? You tell him, please go find some other employment. I employed you for a certain job. You are not there. You are not doing this work. I employed you, for example, to drive my car. You are not there. Any time I need to go somewhere, you are not there. I am driving my own car. Then if I am driving my own car, why do I… Why am I paying you? water. Same principle. The same principle also applies to our purpose on this earth. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala did not create this world without a reason. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told us, people will say, O our Rabb, you have not created all this batil, without any purpose, meaningless. No. It has a purpose. What is the purpose? What is the purpose of our creation? Why did Allah create us? Did Allah leave us to guess? You guess, what is your guess? No. Allah told us. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told us in so many words, and very emphatically. In Surah Az-Zariyat, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الْجِنَّ وَالْإِنسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونَ Allah said, I have not created the jinn and the insan for anything other than my worship. إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونَ Nothing but my worship. I created you to worship me. And the first and foremost and most important form of that worship is Salah. Salah at its time. عَلَى وَقْتِهَا Salah at its time. And for the men, by jam'ah in some masjids. Salah at its time. And then Allah did not leave us to decide what is the meaning of Salah, how to pray. No. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala showed us. Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, a group of young, Sahaba came and they spent two to three weeks with the Rasul alaihi salatu wasalam in his company. They stayed in masjid of the Nabi sh-Sharif. They were given food from the houses of the Nabi alaihi salatu wasalam. And these young Sahaba, they were young boys, but you know, they were Sahaba. Nabi sh-Salam taught them, gave them tarbiyah. And the narrator of the hadith says that, we learned so much that I cannot even narrate all of that at one go. He said after two to three weeks, these are all young boys, they have come from, some of them from distant tribes. So they were missing their homes and parents. But then they are with the Rasul, Rasulullah sallallahu...
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