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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
Episodes
  • Future – 4 stages

    Future – 4 stages
    Jan 3 2026
    Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. In one ayat, Allah SWT mentioned four things. The first thing He said is, Every living thing will taste death. Kullu nafsin. Whether the person is a good person or a bad person. Whether it is Pharaoh or the Nabi. Extremes. Whether it is rich or poor, healthy or wealthy, healthy or sick, whatever. Kullu nafsin da'ikhatul mudh. If it was born, it will die, period. First thing. Second thing. Fa innama tuwaffawna wujurakum yawmal qiyamah. Allah said, And you will receive, your full reward only on the Day of Judgment. So, some reward Allah will give in this dunya. Both good and bad. But actual full reward only on the Day of Judgment. Fa innama tuwaffawna wujurakum yawmal qiyamah. And then Allah SWT stated something which is the, which is a criterion between success and failure. We want to be successful. We want to have great careers. We want to have name, fame, you name it. But Allah SWT said the measure. Faman zuhzi'ani nari wa udkhilal jannata faqad faas. The one who has been saved from the hellfire and entered into Jannah, only that person is successful. Faqad faas. Nobody else. In the Quran, Allah SWT used two words for success. Falah and fawz. Falah and fawz. Muflihoon fa'izoon. Falah is success, but which is temporary. Meaning, after the success, there is some more exam. You passed your metric exam. Successful, alhamdulillah. First in class, what not, what not. But can you say, okay, fine, I'm done. You're not done. That's only metric, 10th class. After this, you have intermediate. You pass that. Are you done? No. Then after that, you have your undergraduate. Are you done? No. Then after that, you have your postgraduate. And this goes on. At the end of all that, you are starting your career. Will you get into the interview or not? Once you get into the interview, now what happens to your career? What happens to your career? You're looking at another 35 years. So even though you are successful, there is some exam after that. But fawz, fawzoon azeem, Allah said, fa'izoon, may Allah grant us all of that, inshallah. Fawz is success, which is ultimate, daiman. Success, after this, there is no exam. Finished. Last exam. Now, it's only, enjoy. Last exam. After this, there is no exam. So who is that person? Who is finally successful? The one who is freed from the hellfire and entered into Jannah. And the last thing which Allah mentioned, Jalal Jalaluhu, He said, He said, This life of this world is nothing but deception. Deception. See, even in the way things are stated. For example, you can say, the life of this world is deception. But Allah did not say that. Allah said, the life of this world is nothing but deception. You know, the emphasis is much more. Nothing but this. So everything in this world which seems to be success, is not success. Deception means what? Deception means whatever appears is not how it appears. Nowadays, thanks to AI, you are getting example after example of deception. People send these videos. There's one doing the rounds. There was one, first of all, of an elephant which, you know, was pushing a deer, a cheetal, out of a flood water. After some time, exactly same kind of flood water. If you notice the two things, it's exactly the same thing. Now this elephant is a tiger. And this elephant is helping this tiger. The tiger is now climbing on top of the elephant. And they say the elephant is helping the tiger. So they sent it to me. They said, is it true or false? I said, total false. They said, how do you say that? What is the AI? I said, you don't have to know AI. You have to know wildlife. There's no earthly way that it won't happen. First of all, because a tiger weighs what? 200 plus kilos. For 200 plus kilos of cat to climb on top of the elephant, what is he using? Four inch claws. . Can you imagine? If he climbs on top of the elephant from the ear on top of the head, what will he do to the ear, to the trunk, to the elephant? Completely lacerate it and destroy it, you know. There's not one drop of blood being shown on that film. Now who will believe that? Because people who don't understand wildlife. Oh, what's happening? What's happening? What's happening? You are being fooled. That's what's happening. It's a very benign form. There's much more malignant ways in which we are being fooled in this life. So fourth is Allah mentioned. The reason I'm saying this is because it is Allah did not simply send the Quran for us to recite it and say wah wah or something. No. The purpose of the nuzool of the Quran is to say, the nuzool of the Quran al-Kareem is to understand it and to live by it. It doesn't matter how much Quran you know. What matters is how much Quran is in your life. How much Quran do you actually need to know? You have to pray. If you know Surah al-Fatiha and you know one...
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  • Resilience is the master hack

    Resilience is the master hack
    Jan 2 2026
    Auto-generated transcript:Resilience is the ability to be resilient. The ability to get up from a fall. And as the Chinese saying goes, if you fall five times, get up six times. The ability to get up from a fall, the ability to deal with failure. This is one of the most important things for success. Because failure is very much a part of life. Everybody fails at something or the other. To be able to get up from the failure, this is what spells success. Now in that context, I read a beautiful story recently, which I want to share with you. That's called the Hershey School. I call it the Hershey Chocolate School because we know Hershey from the chocolates. It's very interesting. I'm just reading what was posted. He sat in a mansion built for children who would never come. And he decided that silence would not be the end of the story. In 1909, in the company town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, Milton Hershey was 43 years old and wildly successful. His chocolate company was thriving. An entire town carried his name. A grand house stood on a hill above the factories and streets he had built from nothing. At night, the house was quiet. Milton and his wife, Catherine, Kitty Hershey, had designed the mansion for children. Bedrooms waited, hallways echoed, gardens sat untouched. Kitty could not have children. And in the early 20th century, childlessness was treated as fate. Wealthy couples were expected to accept it and move on. Milton Hershey did not. To understand why, you have to understand how much failure shaped him. Before success found him, it had missed him repeatedly. His first candy business collapsed. His second failed even worse. By 30, he was broke, embarrassed, and dependent on family support. He knew what it felt like to be written off. So when he looked at that empty house, he did not see an ending. He saw an opening. He saw a new beginning. In 1909, Milton and Kitty announced they were founding a school for orphaned boys. Not a charity they would fund from a distance. A school they would build, run, and shape themselves. People were baffled. Why take on something so demanding when you already had an empire to manage? Because he did not want to donate. He wanted a parent. The boys who arrived had nothing. No money, no security. Often no one left in the world who claimed them. Milton and Kitty met them personally. Milton would kneel to speak to them at eye level and explain that this was not a handout. This was a home. Kitty became the heart of the place. She learned names, checked on homework, asked if the food was good. She mothered the children she could never bear. And the school grew around that. She was loved. Then, in 1915, Kitty died suddenly at 42. Friends assumed the school would fade. It had been their shared dream. And now she was gone. Milton grieved quietly for years, keeping the school running while the world waited for him to step back. In 1918, he did the opposite. Milton Hershey transferred control of the Hershey Chocolate Factory. The Hershey Chocolate Company into a trust for the school. Not a portion, not dividends. Control. The entire enterprise, the Hershey Chocolate Company, now existed to fund the education, housing and care of children who had started life with nothing. Sixty million dollars at the time. An unthinkable sum. His associates warned him. What if he needed the money? What about his legacy? Milton's answer was simple. He was a man. He was a symbol. This was his legacy. He gave away the mansion and turned it into part of the school. He moved into modest quarters. He continued to greet new students, remember faces, ask how they were doing. He lived to see boys graduate and build lives he had made possible. When he died in 1945 at 88, he left behind no heirs by blood. But he left behind a future. Today, the Milton Hershey School serves more than 2,000 children at a time entirely free of charge. Housing, food, clothing, healthcare, education and support are guaranteed. The trust he created now manages tens of billions of dollars, all dedicated to childhoods he would never personally witness. There is a statue on campus of Milton Hershey. It does not show him as an industrial titan, it shows him kneeling beside a child, hand on a small shoulder, eye to eye. That was how he understood family. Most fortunes are built to be inherited by the already fortunate. Milton Hershey had no children to inherit his wealth, so he gave it to children who would have inherited nothing at all. Every piece of chocolate sold under his name still funds the decision. Every year, more lives are shaped by a choice of children. The children are the ones who are the most important. The children are the ones who are shaped by a choice he made more than a century ago. He sat in rooms meant for children who never came. So he made sure they would be filled forever by children who needed them. For one thing, always buy Hershey chocolates and eat only Hershey chocolates. I think that's the least we can...
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  • Live thoughtfully

    Live thoughtfully
    Jan 1 2026
    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 friends. Tasliman kathiran kathira. Faham Badum. My brothers and sisters, as we enter a new year, and today is the 31st of December 2025, tomorrow, inshallah, will be the 1st of January 2026, it's useful to take stock of what we achieved in the last year and decide what we want to do with the year that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has given us once again. Another year, another chance to get it right, if we wish to. The reason we need to be concerned about this is because a day will come which will be our last. It will be the last sunrise or sunset that we will see. It will be the last meal we eat. The last salah we pray or choose. The last prayer we choose not to pray. It will be the last words we say to the last person who is destined to hear them. It will be the last place we go to from which we will then be taken away. We will no longer be able to go or come as we wish. Not go on our own, but taken away. That day will come. That day will come. We don't know when, but we know it will come. The sun will rise for the last time for us. Maybe that day is today. As I grow older, I am aware of an ever-increasing sense of urgency. A feeling that I have progressively less time to leave behind a legacy that can be a credit to me. This sense of urgency has nothing to do with the fact that the reality of time running out is one that we all face. It has more to do with a desire to do something to maximize the benefit of the time that I have left. Naturally, like all of us, I have no idea how much exactly is left. So all the time I have left is a time of time. There is no more reason to act fast. Allah SWT warned us in the Quran again and again and again. And Allah SWT said, It's not the dying that is worrying. It is the accounting. We will not die and become dust. We will not die and become dust. We will be resurrected and called to account. What will we do? What will we do? In this process, to help us to work through this, I developed a theory based on my own life experience, which I call living thoughtfully. Living thoughtfully. I believe that before we act, if we think about what we are about to do, the reasons for it, the possible effects of it, and other alternatives that we may have, and then ask ourselves, do I really want to do this thing in this way? Then we will be able to vastly improve our own effectiveness. But, can we do that? In living thoughtfully, the most important matter is to check our intention. We have the first hadith in Bukhari, narrated by Sayyidina Umar ibn al-Khattab, that Rasulullah SAW said, the reward of a deed is based on its intention. The rewards of deeds are based on their intention. A bribe, for example, is after all a gift. The difference which makes one right and the other wrong is the intention. A gift is good. A bribe is haram. It's bad. Imam al-Nabawi, Rahmatullah Ali, one of the most eminent scholars, author of this hadith, writing about the importance of intention. In his book, Ar-Riyadh as-Saleheen, he begins by saying, He said, He said to live with the awareness of the intention in all that we say, in all that we do, and in every situation that we find ourselves in. Whether visible or hidden. Whether visible or hidden. Imagine living with such a heightened sense of purpose that before a person says anything, he asks himself, why am I saying this? He thinks of the effect of his words. If I say this, what will happen? And then takes responsibility for that. Yes, I want this to happen. Or he said, no, I don't want this to happen, so I will not speak. Now he does the same with every action of his and reflects on his contribution to a person's life. To any situation that he or she is faced with. If we behaved with such a tremendous sense of responsibility, no matter what our position in life, what a wonderful world we would be able to create, our problems of inequity, poverty, environmental degradation, and moral bankruptcy can all be traced to one source. A lack of responsibility for our speech and actions. We lack concern. We must change that. I call on you to do so. I contrast living thoughtfully with the opposite. Living thoughtlessly. Just remaining alive. Going from sensation to sensation. Like a cow or a goat or a dog. Not that I have anything against cows or goats or dogs, but I would like to believe that I am different. In today's social media dominated world, this is what we are doing even more. Living from dopamine hit to dopamine hit. We must break out of this and realize that our clocks are ticking. And our time is drawing to a close. Age is not an indicator of how much time we have. Old or young, we will die at our appointed time. Nobody will get an instant more or ...
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