directing imagination

Directing Imagination

Opening

(السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ وَرَحْمَةُ اللَّهِ وَبَرَكَاتُهُ - assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh)

(بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ - bismillahir-rahmanir-rahim)

Khutbah al-Hajah (Opening Sermon)

(الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ وَكَفَى وَسَلَامٌ عَلَى عِبَادِهِ الَّذِينَ اصْطَفَى أَمَّا بَعْدُ فَأَعُوذُ بِاللَّهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ - alhamdu lillah wa kafaa wa salaamun ala ibadihil lazeena stafa amma badu fa a'uzu billahi minash shaytanir rajeem)

(بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ - bismillahir-rahmanir-rahim)

Opening Ayah

(وَالَّذِينَ جَاهَدُوا فِينَا لَنَهْدِيَنَّهُمْ سُبُلَنَا - wallazeena jahadu feena lanahdiyannahum subulana)

"Glory to your Lord, the Lord of might, [exalted] above what they describe, And peace upon the messengers, And praise to Allah, Lord of the worlds."

Main Body

The Goal of Complete Submission

The goal of the believer is that every single component of their existence be submitted to Allah. That's the challenge and that's what's called life. That every aspect of our being, that every waking moment, that every single breath be submitted and be made conscious of Allah.

This is our goal. So it should be that everything we see, we do so for the sake of Allah. Everything we touch, we do so for the sake of Allah.

Everything we hear, we do so for the sake of Allah. Everything we do, we do so for the sake of Allah. So everything in our existence, every aspect of our being, every single iota of anything about us must be for the sake of Allah and Allah alone.

Now it's interesting that the deeper you begin to understand this, the more its realities open up to you. So superficially, and it's not really superficial, I mean that's basically the first step. What's demanded is that we follow the faraid of the deen.

So for example, your salah has to be for Allah. Your fasting has to be for Allah. Your hajj, your zakah has to be for Allah.

So that's the first step. It's the most important step, it's the major step, and it's the first step. Then you have to follow the sunnah of the messenger of Allah.

You have to spend time reciting the book of Allah. So every aspect of our being, basically it gets submitted to Allah. Now the further you go, the further you go along this path, then what ends up happening is that even the most subtle things about you, they also get submitted to Allah.

The Power of Imagination

So for example, I mean just to give you one very simple example of some aspect of our existence that must be for the sake of Allah, we have an imagination. Allah created within human beings the ability to imagine. We can close our eyes, and we can sit down, and we can think about things that are out of our reach, but that somehow are within the realm of possibility within our mind.

Even that ability to imagine has to be submitted to Allah. Now what happens is that the imagination is a very important part of our being because it drives who we are. So for example, when we have the ability to imagine, you can either apply that to deen, or you can apply that to dunya.

So if you're sitting with a high school student, they'll close their eyes and they'll imagine that they're this famous basketball player. They can imagine, right, that they can actually become this. Even though they don't have the skills, they're short, they don't have the agility, they don't have the speed, they don't have the ability, but in the back of their mind, they have this thought that I can become like Shaquille O'Neal or some famous basketball player, and their imagination will allow them to go from where they are to where they think they can be.

Another person, as they get older in life, they can imagine themselves owning this huge house. They don't own the house, but they can just think that one day I might have that, or one day I might become that. So then what happens is the imagination, Allah created the imagination in such a way that it takes a person from where they are to where they think they should be, and then it begins to connect the dot and plot a mechanism to get there.

That's how Allah created our imaginations. That's how Allah created our minds. It has the ability to go very far in time and very far in space, and then create for us a path to where we want to be.

Now that imagination can be submitted to the dunya, so that a person can sit down and imagine, I'm going to earn this much, I'm going to drive this, I'm going to wear this, I'm going to buy this, I'm going to build this. Or the person can take that same imagination and can apply it to Allah and his deen. And it's when a person learns to take their imagination, their ability to connect things in the abstract world into something real, then they achieve a very high state of Iman.

Lessons from the Shaykh and the Birds

So for example, I'll just give you a very simple example. One Shaykh, he was sitting and he was looking at a tree. He's sitting and he's just looking at a tree.

Now I mean we walk by and we look at trees all the time. So as he's looking at the tree, he sees that a bird comes, and the bird lands on the branch. The branch of a tree.

Now how many times have we seen that? Then he sees that the bird moves around a little bit, walks to the left, walks to the right, and he sees four or five birds also come and join that bird. Then he sees that they're all sitting, they look like they're interacting, they look like they're talking, they look like they're moving, and then a few moments later, all the birds fly away. So he saw that much.

Now, for the average human being, they would see that and they would not even take any notice of it. But this Shaykh, as he was looking at this, he then made the following comment. He said that our life on this earth is exactly like the gathering of those birds.

They landed on the branch, they stood for a few moments, and then they flew away. And that's exactly what our life is. You know, what is our life? If you want to think about our life, is basically the time between the Adhan and the Iqamah of Salah.

That's basically what life is. Right? What happens? We're born, and when we're born, we get the Adhan called in our ear. And then we live 40, 50, 60, 70 years, and then we have our Salah of Janazah.

So basically what happens is, you know, the way to look at it is that life is what exists in between the time of the Adhan and the Salah. Now, if you think about life that way, if you think about life being that short, and you recognize how short it is, then you ask yourself, okay, let's say that we're about to pray the Isha prayer, right?

Let's say the Adhan is at 7 o'clock, the prayer is at 7:15. So if the Adhan is at 7 o'clock and the prayer is 7:15, what are we going to do for those 15 extra minutes? Are we going to run around and try to accomplish five different tasks in those 15 minutes? Or are we going to sit and recognize that the Salah is coming soon, and we need to focus on that Salah? So the same thing with a human being. I mean, how long really is life? We might think that it's long.

We might think that 50, 60, 70 years seems like a long time, but it's not. It's a short period of time in between this initial Adhan and the eventual Salah. And so we have to take advantage of that time.

We can't waste our time running around doing foolish things. We have to spend our time benefiting people, worshiping Allah, focusing on Allah, concentrating on this Deen, making ourselves into something that... writing a book of deeds that can be presented to Allah on the Day of Judgment, because that's what's going to be read, and in return we'll get Jannah, inshallah. But this is the focus of a human being.

Now think about this. You know, some people, they look at an empty piece of land and they say, one day I can build a house there. So their imagination is all the way on the other side, right? They're thinking about what they can do for themselves in this life.

Another person looks at a branch, and they see two birds, three, four, five birds gathering, and they see that these birds just interact for a very short moment and then fly away. And then from that, they're able to pull such a deep principle of the Deen. I'll just take another example.

Imam Ghazali's Reminder of Death

Imam Ghazali, he used to sit with his students. And on occasion, while he was sitting with his students, he would say, who knows that perchance one of your death cloth has arrived in the market. Now you know that when people are buried, all their clothing is removed, and then they're wrapped up in cloth, right? All right?

So he would say to his students as he was sitting on occasion that none of you knows that perchance your death cloth has already arrived in the market.

Think about that. Now, we go to the market all the time, right? Do we ever think that, oh, maybe my own death cloth is sitting in this market today. Right? We see trucks carrying all these goods back and forth.

Did we ever think, maybe this truck is carrying the wood for my coffin? Maybe this truck is carrying the cloth that my body is going to be wrapped in? You never know. So this is the way, this is the way that the people of the deen use their imagination. They imagine what the reality of existence truly is.

Hadith: Be Like a Stranger

And this is what the Prophet told us, right?

(Sahih al-Bukhari)

"Be in the world as though you are a stranger or a traveler."

Be in the dunya like a stranger. Or like a traveler. The person who just kind of sits under a shade and then goes away.

So if you're sitting in the park and you look at people sitting under a tree, people come, they sit under the shade for the tree, maybe they sit an hour, maybe they sit two hours, eventually they get up and they move on. Same thing with this life. We have not been sent here except to be here for a few hours.

Allah placed us here. We have a purpose of being here. We have an opportunity present before us while we're here.

We will be placed in our graves and we will move on to the next step. There is no permanence in this part of our life. So why would we try to make it permanent? This place has not been made as a place to relax.

Example of Shaykh Zulfiqar

This life has not been made as a place to relax. Shaykh Zulfiqar, I used to sit with him, I used to watch how hard he used to work. I've never seen him sleep more than two hours at a time.

I've never seen him sleep more than two hours at a time. And I was with him for so many days and I would see how many talks he would give in a day, how many people he would be addressing, how many people would come with their problems, how many letters he would be reading, how many responses he would be writing. Never did I see him sleep more than two hours straight.

So one time we were sitting together, his eyes were bloodshot. You know, I mean, working hard every single moment for the sake of the akhirah. So somebody said to him, you know, hazrat, why don't you take some rest? Look at yourself.

Look at your eyes, they're bloodshot. You're so tired, your eyes are closing while you're talking to people. Why don't you take some rest? So all of a sudden, out of that haze of fatigue, he just kind of woke up with all this energy and he looked at that person straight in the face.

And he said, inshallah, we'll sleep in our graves. There'll be a lot of time to sleep in the grave. There'll be a lot of time to sleep in the grave.

The Purpose of This Life

So this life is actually a place to do something. And it's not meant to try to amass the goods of this life. What it's meant to be is a place for us to amass the deeds so that we have some payment to make in order to earn jannah.

That's what this life is about. It's a place where we begin to collect for the difficult days that lie ahead. This is one phase.

We're birds traveling. We landed on this branch. We're moving to the next branch.

We will not be here forever. No one is here forever. We are meant to move on.

But the purpose of this part of the journey is to gather together the necessary goods so that we can take what we need for the next stage. Because the next stage is the grave. And when we're in the grave, we're going to need protection from the hellfire.

We're going to need to answer the question of the angels. They're going to come and take a test from us. We're going to need protection from the constriction of the grave.

And all of these things have been carefully explained to us in this life so that we can protect ourselves in the hereafter. The darkness that exists in the next life, what's going to protect us from it is our iman. The constriction of the grave and the lack of space that exists there, what's going to protect us from that is our deeds.

It's only when we have deeds that the grave will expand and a window from jannah will open into the grave. So for us, we have to recognize exactly what the reality of this life is. And people can use their imagination in either way.

They can imagine that they're going to be here forever, that they're never going to die, that this life is permanent, and the most important thing is all the goods that I amass and everything that I can try to achieve in this life. Or they can recognize that the reality of this life is passing, it's fleeting, there's nothing to it. And that what really matters is the hereafter.

And that my wealth is an excuse to get me into jannah. My time and the deeds that I perform is an excuse to get me into jannah. Every effort that I make is an excuse to get me into jannah.

So we should not be wasting our time. It's amazing, we waste so much time. We fool around, we don't take advantage of the moments that Allah has bestowed upon us, only to regret that time later.

Only to regret that time later. So take advantage of your moments, take advantage of your time. Train your imagination to connect the dots for the hereafter so that you don't get caught up in connecting the dots in this life.

Closing Dua

So may Allah make us among those who focus on the hereafter, and be among those who recognize the fleeting moments in this life and the permanence of the next.

(وَآخِرُ دَعْوَانَا أَنِ الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ - wa akhiru da'wana anil hamdu lillahi rabbil 'alameen)