The Young & The Religious - Corrected Khutba Transcription
By Abdul Nasir Jangda | 2026-01-19T06:38:33.168289+00:00 | Topic: General
The Young & The Religious - Shaykh Abdul Nasir Jangda
Opening Remarks
"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."
"All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and blessings and peace upon the Messenger of Allah, and upon his family and companions, all of them."
So I'm going to go ahead and get this out of the way for the rest of the weekend. So nobody else has to address it or talk about it. Rebecca Black.
All right. All right. Now let's go ahead and get serious now. It's done. It's finished. Halas. End of story. That's it. Get out of your system.
All right. It's not Friday. It's Saturday now. All right. So get it all out of your system. And no, but inshallah, there's there's actually something serious I wanted to address in regards to this whole situation, because that's the only word I can come up with it for.
But I have a talk, I think, later today about Facebook, and I'm going to be addressing something in regards to that. But nevertheless.
Understanding Youth in Islam
So talking about the subject at hand, which Mashallah Sheikh Yasser really beautifully explained the concept of youth within Islam and what's really important about what he explained, because I want you to understand how valuable that was.
He's giving you how Islam and the sacred sources of Islam, which are. Come on, people. I just I'm not going to tell you. Well, I kind of tweet a lot. So sometimes I have the opportunity to visit a very sleepy community that doesn't really interact or respond when I talk. And I'm not in the mood to deal with it.
OK. So when I ask a question, what are you guys going to do? All right. That was pretty pathetic.
All right. Later today, Wissam Sharif is coming. And when he asked the question, if you don't respond, he'll probably start doing jumping jacks or something.
So you better get it together right now. OK. So the sacred sources of our religion are number one, the Qur'an and number two, the messenger, (عليه السلام)
All right. What he just explained to you is how the sacred sources of our religion view is view youth. What how are youth viewed within Islam? And that's very important to understand, because that works into the context of the actual hadith.
The Narrator: Abu Huraira رضي الله عنه
Now, I know you guys had some sessions yesterday, so I apologize if this is going to be repeating something from yesterday. But I want you to get a little bit of a flavor or I want you to get a little bit of context of the actual narration, the text itself, because within that itself, there's such magnificent beauty and eloquence of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم,to be witnessed and to be observed and to be felt within the actual narration that I want you to get a little taste of it. So the Prophet عليه السلام
And by the way, this narration is narrated by Abu Huraira رضي الله عنه. And one thing I always like to point out to especially our young brothers and sisters is I want you to know about these people. I want you to know about these people because we're here to talk about how we can secure our place under the shade.
All right. And many times when you want to try to build an ambition or a goal such as this, what helps in formulating a goal or a an ambition and to find your inner drive is to be able to identify someone who had similar goals and was able to achieve their goals. All right.
This is Chicago. So when we talk about the sporting world, you guys pretty much have the greatest athlete that our generation ever witnessed. Right. Michael Jordan. Right. And so every basketball player that comes along that dreams about the Hall of Fame and gold medals and rings and championships and scoring titles, every basketball player that comes along.
Who's that one? Who's that one guy in his head, that one image that he has in his head that's fixated? Michael Jordan. And it helps that young man or even young woman, for that matter, who is venturing into the area of sports to want to achieve that same level of success. All right.
And so similarly, we want to find our place in that shade. I want to be there in that shade. So I'm going to have to learn to identify those individuals who are who made their way to that shade and that were remarkable and amazing and set the bar, set the precedent, set the standard before us and then try to emulate those people and look up to those people and live my life according to those people.
Abu Huraira's Knowledge and Focus
So Abu Huraira, I mean, we don't have any confirmation. Only Allah knows best. But in our (حُسْنُ الظَّنِّ) and in our admiration for him, you know, we should have no qualms about saying the fact that he is more than likely one of those remarkable people that will be in that shade on the Day of Judgment.
And what's remarkable about him? And I want you to know a little bit about him. The organizer specifically asked me to kind of address the issue of knowledge here just real quickly. So what I wanted to tell you about knowledge was Abu Huraira who is such a remarkable person.
He accepted Islam in the beginning of the seventh year of hijrah. In the beginning of the seventh year of the Prophet's residence in Medina, the Muslim calendar. All right.
The Prophet عليه السلام passed away after 10 years of residence in Medina, which basically means that Abu Huraira had about three years to spend in the company of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم . All right So so far, these are just statistics and facts.
All right. But what makes it so remarkable is even though he spent only three years as a Muslim in the company of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he became the most illustrious narrator of traditions of hadith from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم. Allama Zahabi actually says that (حَمَلَ عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم عِلْمًا كَثِيرًا) that he carried so much abundant knowledge from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم (لَمْ يُقَلْ فِي كَثْرَةِ النَّقْلِ عَنْهُ) Nobody was able to imagine in the sheer volume of knowledge that he was able to transmit from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم
There are over 5000 narrations that come exclusively just from this one individual. And I want you to think about that, to be able to accomplish that in three small years. And you know what leads to that type of a success? It's focus.
It's focus. He was telling you about focus. It's focus that leads to that type of success.
Because he was even asked one time, said, Abu Hurairah, how are you able to do this? I mean, nobody comes even near you in this area. And you spend such little time with the Messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم like in terms of years. How are you able to achieve this? And he said, you know, while some people were busy with business and some people were busy with their farms and their agriculture and etc, etc, etc.
I made it my sole focus and objective to spend time and to take knowledge from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم. So when a person has focus, that's what they're able to achieve. And that's what we're talking about here.
The Hadith of Seven Under Allah's Shade
So now to get into the text of the hadith. So he narrates from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم. It says seven categories of individuals.
(Bukhari hadith 660, Muslim hadith 1031)
"Allah will give them a place. Allah will give them a shade in his shade. Allah will give them a shade in his shade."
And what's very interesting here is that the word ظلّ in the Arabic language, going back to its origins and its roots, if you look at the lexicons, classical lexicons, the word ظِلّ itself, which is a word for shade, in the Arabic language, it has the connotation of being very comforting. It's just the idea and the structure of the word was very comforting to the Arabs in and of itself. And that was very strategically done because a shade for any human being is a source of comfort.
It is a natural human desire to be under some type of shelter or protection. And then particularly think about being an Arab. Think about being in the middle of Arabia 1400 years ago.
There's no, I mean, and subhanAllah, how remarkable that in the one place in the world where you required the shade the most, it's hardest to come by shade, right? I mean, do you find a lot of trees going in the middle of the desert? Of course not.
So then the one place in the world where you'd want a shade, it's hard to come by a shade. So shade was like a luxury to the Arabs.
And that's where this word comes from. So Allah, when the Prophet عليه السلام is saying, Allah will give them a shade in his shade. It's not just like we take it for granted because we're indoors right now, living it up.
Right. But you've got to put yourself in that mindset that imagine the greatest, most precious blessing of all time. Imagine your greatest need and desire.
And Allah is providing that for you in an extremely honorable and dignified way. (يَوْمَ لَا ظِلَّ إِلَّا ظِلُّهُ) And by the way, it's a rare commodity. It's not like it's available all around.
It's not like, OK, Allah is giving them a shade under his shade. But guess what? There's a bunch of shades all around. No, no, no, no.
It doesn't work like that. It's really hard to find the shade. And then the very first category that we're told about, that we're informed about, that the one that we're talking about here is (شَابٌ نَشَأْ فِي عِبَادَةِ اللَّهِ) (Bukhari hadith 660) And of course, Sheikh Asa told us about the meaning of young person.
Understanding the Arabic Text
And I wanted to clarify this here again based on the text of the hadith, because as the sessions continue and as you go forward throughout the rest of the sessions that are based on different excerpts from that same narration, that same hadith, then there will be certain narrations that we'll use in a masculine form. Even this one, (شاب), this is masculine, but this is a little more subtle. There will be some that will straight up just say (رَجُلٌ) which means man.
And so you have to understand that the masculine gender is a universal gender. It's not exclusive to males, but this is rather universal. All right.
And any student of literature should be familiar with that. All right. That's something that applies in many, many different languages.
All right. And in fact, this is something classical scholars even commented on, where Ibn Hajar Asqalani, he actually says that this masculine form throughout the context of this hadith actually is general to both
men and to women. And so that needs to be understood just because you'll come across some places and it might end up being translated as and a man.
But I want you to remember this is equally talking about you as much as it is talking about them. All right. (شَابٌ نَشَأَ فِي عِبَادَةِ اللهِ) Now we go forward
The next word is (نَشَاً). (نشأ) means typically when you see a rough translation of this hadith, it will say a youth who grew up. All right.
And that's kind of the meaning of the word (نَشَاً). (نَشَأَ) means not just to be created, but it means to rise up. It means to grow up. It actually refers to the process of rising up and growing up, flourishing, blossoming, if you will. So it's talking about the entire process of the maturation process, the maturing process, like Shaykh Yasir was talking about. From when you start to attain that sensibility and become accountable for your actions from that point on until you become a full fledged mature adult that ends up being not responsible just for himself anymore, but then responsible for other people in terms of having a family.
The Meaning of Consistency
So that refers to that entire process of growing up. So basically what we find out from this verb is that this is referring to continuity. There needs to be consistency.
We can't be one hit wonders. All right. We can't be one hit wonders.
This is something that we're going to have to try to find a level of consistency with (فِي عِبَادَةِ اللَّهِ) in the word (في) means in. See, Arabic is a very, a very vivid, a very graphic language and especially classical language.
Classical Arabic has a lot of imagery built into it. So (في) means inside of. It literally means inside of.
And so the imagery there is imagine being immersed in something. Imagine being surrounded by something, being encased in something that everywhere you look, everywhere you turn, that's all you see. That's what you're continuously surrounded by.
So what the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم is saying is, he's saying that one of the individuals, one of the category of people that will have the special honor and distinction on the day of judgment is that young person who grew up, who matured while being surrounding him or herself with what? (عِبَادَةُ اللهِ) the worship of Allah. Now we're going to get down to the core of the issue. We're going to talk about the word (عِبَادَة)
Understanding Ibadah (Worship)
So (عبادة) gets commonly translated as. Worship. All right, thank you, four people.
عِبَادَة commonly gets translated as. Worship. Very good. Jazakumullahu khairan. All right. So عِبَادَة commonly gets translated as worship, and that's fine.
That is actually the meaning of عِبَادَة . But there's always lessons. There's always beauty.
And when you take into consideration the other derivatives of a word from Arabic. All right. So another very basic derivative of this word عِبَادَة is the word عَبْدِ.
What does the word عَبْدِ mean, everyone? Slave. All right. So now we're realizing that there's a connection here.
What's the connection between being a slave and between worshiping? Because worshiping is a manifestation, is the physical manifestation of the slavery that we feel towards Allah. It basically means that if we are true in our claim that we are slaves of Allah, then we have no choice but to worship Him, but to worship Him. And if we do not engage in the worship of Allah, I can stand here and sing from the top of my lungs as much as I want that I'm a slave of Allah.
I'm a slave of Allah. I'm a slave of Allah. I'll be doing the entertainment session later tonight.
No, I won't. All right. So I can stand here and say it over and over again.
I'm a slave of Allah. But if I do not engage, if I cannot put my forehead on the ground, if I cannot worship my creator, then I am lying. I am false in my claim that I am a slave of Allah.
And that's just the cold, hard truth of it. That's just the cold, hard truth of it. And that's something we got to come to terms with.
The Challenge of Humility
Humility is something that is very hard to come by in our culture. And it's something that is not looked upon very fondly within the global culture that we live in today. I mean, right now, you know, with March Madness to... I got a text from a friend last night who was watching cricket matches.
God forgive him. All right. So with the current culture of just sporting events constantly going on, this is something that's readily like that's always on display for us, by the way, turn on any random sporting event.
And that's usually the type of behavior a lot of our youth are emulating. All right. And humility is the last thing you'll come by.
It's all about self congratulating, self celebrating. All right. And that's sort of become the culture that we live in.
So humility, humbling ourselves and living up to that claim of being a slave of Allah is extremely important, very, very important. Now, having said that, what I wanted to next talk about is so being a young person who lives, who grows up, who matures, who comes to adulthood and to maturity while being completely surrounded, immersed in and completely engrossed and engulfed in the worship of Allah. All right.
Making Worship Practical
Now let's talk a little bit about first of all, that sounds really difficult. I'm just going to be real with you. I'm going to be very honest with you.
That sounds very difficult. Like, wow, like, do I have to wear like a tasbih around my neck and sleep in the masjid? Like, what does that mean? Like, I don't understand what that sounds difficult. Right.
So the first thing I want you to understand is this is, again, eloquence of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم). This is figurative in a sense of growing up, living your life in such a manner, especially this young part of your life, where when you do approach the worship of Allah, it is something that you completely devote and dedicate yourself to. When it's time for salah, there's nothing that could take you away from your salah.
The most, I mean, your greatest desire in the world could not rip you and pull you away from that prayer. And again, that goes back to that earlier point that I talked about. And that requires focus.
That requires focus. And in order to achieve that focus, we're going to have to put in a little bit of work. We're going to have to learn to appreciate this worship.
And we're going to have to learn to see the amazing side and the blessings of this worship. The next thing that I wanted to talk about here is while we're on the subject of عِبَادَة and because it's painting a very bleak picture for a lot of young people, like how do I constantly just stay and find consistency in the worship of Allah? So now what I wanted to do was talk about the boundaries of عِبَادَة. And this is something that is a huge problem in the Muslim community.
Redefining the Boundaries of Worship
We need to redefine the boundaries of عِبَادَة because we have a crisis at hand where we've created this very, very narrow understanding of what is worship of Allah, what is عِبَادَة. And therefore, we've made it more difficult for ourselves to be committed to living a God conscious life, to be living a good, pious, righteous lifestyle, because عِبَادَة is just something that is so unattainable for us. It's only fasting or only prayer or only recitation of Qur'an.
And that's it. So I want to define what are the boundaries of عِبَادَة. And I want you to understand عِبَادَة is anything.
عبادة is anything, any act, any even state of being that helps you show Allah how dedicated and committed you are to Him. It is anything that you do that helps you to display, to show, to prove to Allah that you are committed and dedicated to Him. Now, when we look at it that way, we're about to redefine a lot of these things.
So we don't only have to and we should that necessarily five times a day, we definitely have to. But we don't always have to just be making wudu and performing salah to be engaged in عِبَادَة. If you say (سُبْحَانَ اللَّهِ) everybody say (سُبْحَانَ اللَّهِ)
Everyone say (الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ) Everyone say (اللَّهُ أَكْبَرُ) Congratulations, you just committed, you just did عِبَادَة
Practical Examples of Worship
That's عبادة that's worship. All right, when you when you go outside or when it's time for lunch and you get some food and you see another student attending the conference sitting next to you and they don't have any food in front of them and you open up your tray and you say, come on, come join me, take half my sandwich. And you do it because you care about that person.
You love that person because that is your Muslim brother or your Muslim sister. All right. Don't do it for each other.
All right. None of that business. All right.
So when you do that and you did it simply because it's my Muslim brother or my Muslim sister, you just performed عِبَادَة. You cared for your fellow Muslim. All right.
Mashallah, I don't see a lot of people with cell phones in their hands, so I'm not going to mess with you, but all right. If you text your parents, all right, you text your parents. I love you.
Thank you very much. I appreciate everything you do for me. You say something nice to your parents.
You smile at your parents. You say a few words of appreciation to your parents. You just performed عِبَادَة.
That's just simply how easy it is. That's how easy it is. And so we need to redefine these boundaries of عبادة helping humanity, picking up a piece of trash when you go outside.
You know, it's one of the biggest problems we come across a lot of times when we have these conferences and these sessions is when it gets late night, you know, all the late night hanging out and all the late night chilling, right? That's whatever. I'm not going to comment. All right.
But what the worst part, personally, the worst part I find about that is when you ventured back down into the lobby at Fajr time to pray Fajr and you just kind of walk by the the couches and the lounges and the places where everybody was chilling at night, it's like a tornado came through there. We trash the place, right? Not rock star trash the place, but nevertheless, still we trash the place. There's cups and there's
bottles of water and there's tissue and there's napkins and there's food and there's leftover wrappers and there's everything's just kind of left around there.
We just kind of just trash the place a little bit. Picking up that piece of trash, that's also عبادة cleaning up after yourself. What did the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) tell us? This is actually one of the branches of Iman.
(Bukhari hadith 2989, Muslim hadith 1009)
Iman to remove something harmful from people's path. You think somebody likes to come and sit down on a couch and find their leftover Starbucks like spill all over the couch? Nobody likes to see that. It's going to harm somebody.
That's that's disturbing to people. But when you clean up after yourself and remove that, forget about عِبَادَة that's a branch of Iman, which is the actual objective of عِبَادَة, which drives the عِبَادَة. So you actually prove and establish your faith when you just simply pick up some trash and clean up after yourself.
The Example of Charity
You know, Sheikh talked about the tsunami and the earthquake in Japan. All right. When you do a little something, whatever is in your capacity, I love talking about giving, donating, right, to student audiences and be like, brother, why? Why don't you go talk to the Dr. Saab's, right? They got they're the ones with all the cash, right, Dr. Saab? All right.
So but I love talking to student audiences about giving in charity because we misunderstood the giving of charity, kind of, again, the culture we've established in our community for fundraising and for charity giving. It's kind of it's it's given this impression to young people or people that might not have thousands and thousands of dollars that for some reason they're not they don't have a role to play in this whole area, this whole arena of عِبَادَة, this whole area of عِبَادَة. All right.
Because we always hear 25,000, 25,000, who's got 10,000, 5,000, 4,000. We hear that and we think, oh, man, I'm definitely no, that's not for me. I'm a college student.
Right. But that's not true. We go back and we look at the Qur'an and what did the Qur'an tell us? مثَلٌ
who gives anything, something in the path of Allah is like the example of a seed, one seed.
Why does Allah give the example of one seed? Because it is so insignificant. So tiny, one seed. But subhanAllah, what does Allah say happens to that one seed? (أَنبَتَتْ سَبْعَ سَنَابِلَ) It sprouts out seven different branches.
(فِي كُلِّ سُنبُلَةٍ مِّائَةٌ حَبَّةٍ) Each branch carries how many seeds? A hundred seeds of itself. One seed became how many seeds? Seven hundred.
So when you can give one dollar, raise your hands. If in this room you can spare one dollar. Everybody can. Everybody can spare one dollar.
All right. Forget about it. Can everyone spare at least a quarter? Everybody can spare a quarter.
All right. Well, guess what? Allah at a minimum will multiply that for you seven hundred times. Seven hundred times.
But you got to give. You got to give. You got to make excuses for yourself.
That's a major roadblock in trying to achieve عِبَادَة, is when we make excuses for ourselves. All right. So give something.
You hear about people suffering, people dying. Let the humanity in you awaken. All right. Be a good person and give something. Help somebody. All right.
Dealing with Temptation
Now the last couple of things I wanted to say here. Two last things. Is there are many many roadblocks in living this life immersed in engulfed in عِبَادَة devotion and dedication to Allah, where I live my complete life in such a way where I'm doing everything to please Allah in a way that it pleases Allah.
Means I can eat. I can sleep. I can hang out with my friends. I can go and work out. I can have recreation. But I will be conscious of what is right and what is wrong in the course of that action.
So when I play ball with my friends, I'm not going to curse. I'm not going to swear. And when I run into somebody or I elbow somebody in the head, I will apologize.
And I will say, I'm very very sorry. And that is my عِبَادَة. That's my worship.
All right. Now, what are some of the roadblocks? There are many many roadblocks. The roadblocks can be summarized into one word and that is temptation.
And that's why Sheikh Yasir was talking about temptation. Temptation is the thing that often pulls young people away from this life dedicated to living in the obedience, in devotion, dedication to Allah. It is temptation.
Whether it be of the opposite gender, whether it be drugs and alcohol, whether it be of wasting time, whatever it is, it is temptation. And how do we fight? How do we resist that temptation? And this is another thing I love explaining to young people because the answer is a lot easier than you might think it is. All right, because young people, that's the number one question.
Like, how do I deal with this? Dealing with temptation is so simple. And that is good company is the key. Insulate yourself.
You know what insulation is? When there's insulation in the walls, you don't feel the cold that's outside. You don't feel the cold that's outside. All right, it insulates you.
Insulate yourself with good like-minded people. Find two brothers, three brothers, four brothers on campus that have the same commitment, dedication to pleasing Allah as you do. Find two, three, four, five sisters on your campus that have that same level of commitment and dedication.
And you will feel insulated. Dealing and resisting temptation will become easier. I guarantee it.
Perfection is Not Required
All right, and the last thing I wanted to say here now and on this note is probably I feel the most important realization at the end of this talk. And that is, notice what the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) said, شابٌ نَشَأْ فِي عِبَادَةِ اللَّهِ A young person who grew up immersed in commitment, dedication and obedience worship of Allah. Did it say perfection anywhere in there? It didn't say he was perfect.
It didn't say he never made a mistake. It didn't say that he never slipped up and never said that anywhere. And that's the second thing that gets us.
You're going to go home from this conference. You're going to hear these amazing speakers in their lectures. And you're going to say, that's it.
That was the motivation I needed. That was a spark I needed. I'm going to change the way I live my life.
And you're going to start out good. And a day or two day or three days or four days are going to go by. And you're going to be doing fantastic.
And then you're going to hit a little bit of a speed bump. You're going to hit a little bit of a bump in the road. And what it does to a lot of people at that moment, they mess up, they slip up just a little, and just completely throws them, spins them out, throws them off balance.
See, I can't do it. I messed up again. This is impossible.
It's not practical. The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) never asked us to be perfect. In fact, I'll even broaden the scope of this.
Find for me in the Qur'an, anywhere, wherever Allah has ever asked us to be perfect. He hasn't. All He's asked us to do is try hard.
Do the best you can. And y'all are young people. Your potential is limitless.
Not like that ridiculous movie where he takes a pill and goes skydiving. All right? I mean, truly, honestly, limitless. Y'all are capable of so much.
I mean, we don't have time here to talk about the accomplishments of young people. But y'all are capable of so much. Y'all are gold and silver minds.
You can do so much. Don't get bogged down. Don't get hung up over a couple of slip-ups here and there.
Everybody has them. Everybody makes them. All right? All you have to remember to do is keep your hope attached to the mercy of Allah. Keep doing the best that you can do.
And don't focus on your imperfections, but rather focus on the perfection of Allah's mercy and His forgiveness. May Allah give us all the ability to practice everything that was said and heard.
Closing Dua
"Our Lord, accept [this] from us. Indeed You are the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing. And accept our repentance. Indeed, You are the Accepting of repentance, the Merciful."
"And may Allah send blessings upon our Prophet Muhammad, and upon his family and companions, and grant them peace."
"O Allah, forgive us our sins and the excess [committed] in our affairs and plant firmly our feet and give us victory over the disbelieving people."