Auto-generated transcript:My brothers and sisters, as my brother recited the ayah from the Quran concerning Ramadan, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Ya ayyuha allatheena amanu kutiba alaykumu sriyamu kama kutiba ala allatheena min qablikum la'allakum tattaqun which as he translated means, O you who believe, fasting has been prescribed upon you as it was prescribed for those before you so that you may become pious, may become more God conscious. It's very important therefore to understand that fasting like salaah, like prayer for example, and like all the acts of worship in Islam is a tool. It's a tool to achieve something. It's not for itself. Salaah for example, prayer is not for itself. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Inna as-salata tanha anil fahshai wal munkar. The purpose of salaah is to separate you from, to protect you from, to keep you far apart from all forms of sins and all forms of misdeeds and all forms of rebellion and all forms of promiscuity and shamelessness. So if I am praying five times a day and I find I'm still lying and cheating and slandering people and blackbiting and doing all kinds of stuff, then doing drugs and alcohol and God knows what, then obviously I need to check my salaah to say what is wrong with my prayer that it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to do. My prayer is supposed to make me lead a clean life, but my life is still dirty even though I'm praying. So something is wrong with my prayer, right? Take any tool, take absolutely any tool that we use. Every tool has a purpose. The tool is not for itself. You don't take the tool and you polish it and everything else and keep it nice and safe on top of a shelf. You use the tool, whatever the tool is. And if the tool is not working, then you see the results of that. So I'm, this tool is supposed to do this for me, it's not doing it, it means there's something wrong with the tool. I go, I fix the tool. And that's what we do with our all forms of worship. Salah is to keep us, to help us to lead a life which is clean and pure. Fasting is to help us to become conscious of God, of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in every aspect of our lives. It's not for its, fasting is not a endurance test of how long you can stay without food and water. Fasting is meant to do something and that something is to make us conscious of Allah so that every action of mine, everything that I am going to do before I decide, I will ask myself, is this something which is going to please Allah or not? If it is something that will please Allah, I do it. If it is something that does not please Allah, I will not do it. And if it is something about which I have a doubt, whether this will please Allah or not, I don't know, then I will not do it until I clarify the doubt and then of course I decide to do it or not to do it. That is the meaning of taqwa. Taqwa is to have this awareness of the presence of Allah in my life. Now that does two major benefits for us. It does two great pieces of good for us. The first thing is that a person of taqwa remains protected from all forms of sin and all forms of disobedience of Allah. Please understand this, in Islam every sin is intrinsically bad. Somebody asked me many years ago, over twenty-five years ago, I was speaking at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and it was a lecture called Introduction to Islam and at the end of that, a lady in the back, she raised her hand and I said, yes please and she said to me, she said, what is the Sharia? Right? Every once in a while you have this thing of saying, America is coming under Sharia law. I mean it won't happen in a thousand years, let me assure you. But at the same time, people make up these rumors. So somebody said, what is the Sharia? So I said to her, Sharia is the way in which every decent, law-abiding, socially conscious, a person of principles would like to live, period. Even if you remove Islam from it and say forget about Islam, let us just look at the Sharia law itself.
