Mercy, Respect & Service

Mercy, Respect & Service

Speaker: Mufti Menk

Opening

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, and blessings and peace upon the Messenger of Allah, and upon his family and companions all of them.

My brothers, my sisters, guess what? Can you guess what I'm about to say? Can you? If cities had nicknames, and guess what it would be? BAC. B-A-C-K. So we would be saying Adelaide BAC, (مَا شَاء اللة - ma sha'a Allah).

Because it's very very laid back, (الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ - alhamdulillah) compared to other cities, (مَا شَاء الله - ma sha'a Allah). May Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى bless you guys. I can't believe five minutes from the airport to here to there, and another five minutes from the hotel to here, and another five minutes from there to one other place, and five minutes from this school to the other school, and five minutes from there to here, and they told me if your flight is leaving at 11, we don't mind leaving the hotel at 10.

I'm like, this is laid back. This is laid back (ما شاء الله - ma sha'a Allah). May Allah bless you all.

We All Need Each Other

My brothers and sisters, every single one of us has been created in a way that we need the help of others in order to survive. Have you thought of that? Nobody is absolutely independent. Although yes, we are dependent upon Allah and Allah alone to fulfill our needs, but Allah requires and He sends to us those who will help us fulfill those needs.

It doesn't mean it's not from Allah. If I were not well and I needed the doctor, I would need to pray to the Almighty for cure, and I would still need to visit the doctor and pray that Allah grants the doctor the ability to diagnose correctly and to prescribe the correct medication, or to hold his hand while he is operating in the case of the need of an operation or surgery, and to grant success either to the procedure or the medication that I have taken. But it was from Allah.

Do you get what I'm saying? So, no matter what, we need Allah, definitely. But, together with that, the plan of Allah includes the fact that we need each other. For this reason, Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى says in the Quran:

"And do not forget graciousness between you."

Don't forget to be virtuous, to be kind to one another.

Don't forget to reach out to one another in a good way, to be good to each other because you're going to need each other, as you actually live on this earth. Starting with birth, immediately upon birth, a child needs help. If you were left and nobody actually took care of you, you and I would never survive.

We needed those around us in order for us to survive. Someone needed to tend to us, to feed us, to clothe us, to ensure we were warm, to make sure that we were changed or cleansed, etc. And this is why Allah has automatically kept a love for babies in the hearts of the vast majority of humankind.

The Divine Mercy in Creation

When you see a little baby, in actual fact, I'm going to say something you might not agree with, but I don't mind, okay? You might not find the baby really to be so cute, but you have to say, Oh, so cute, right? And if you were to look carefully at that image and scrutinize it, you know, there's crumpled up and everything. You're just going to say so cute because it's so small. The cuteness is perhaps in the size, in the petiteness.

It's Allah who created this automatic connection between adults and little babies. Do you know why? Because Allah wants you to be merciful. That's the reason.

So merciful. And the most love perhaps is that of a mother. It's described in several narrations of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

It's described when the Almighty tells us through the blessed lips of the messenger, peace be upon him, how merciful he himself is. He compares it to the mercy of a mother and multiplies it so many fold. So the mothers are actually merciful.

They're considered merciful, (سُبْحَانَ الله - subhanAllah). Where did the mercy come from? It came from the Almighty. Why is it there? Why did Allah keep a connection between you and your child? So that you can look after the child in the initial years and that's why Allah tells us, when you're an adult, don't forget your parents.

They may become more difficult than you were when you were a baby. (سُبْحَانَ اللهِ - subhanAllahi). Do you know why? When an adult misbehaves, sorry, when a child misbehaves, a little infant misbehaves, it's forgivable, it's excusable.

But when your mother misbehaves, when I say misbehaves, I mean, she's saying bad words, she's impatient, she becomes angry, she demands a lot from you. It becomes even more difficult because you don't expect it from an adult. But that's Allah's plan.

It is the Almighty who creates. When He created mankind in weakness and then strength and then back to weakness and grey hair. Notice, the Almighty says, when I created you, you were in the condition of weakness.

Later on, I gave you strength. The Quran speaks about 40 years being the peak of the age, right? And then you go down the mountain. So, perhaps, you know, the average age is 60, 70, 80.

Say, I asked a group of children today, earlier at a school I visited, how long they would like to live for? (سُبْحَانَ اللهِ - subhanAllahi) you should have heard some of the responses (ما شاء الله - ma sha'a Allah). And I think there were those who were reasonable were saying 80 years, someone said 60 years, someone said anytime after 40.

(سُبْحَانَ الله - subhanAllah)

I said, no, I think you'd like to up that a little bit (سُبْحَانَ الله - subhanAllah) may Allah grant us ease. I wonder if someone asked me, how long would you like to live for? I don't know what the answer would be.

I guess one of the smart students said, for as long as Allah wants me alive, I'll be alive. When Allah wants me to go, I will go. Wow, (مَا شَاءَ اللهُ - ma sha'a Allahu) amazing.

If we had it our way, we would never want to die. None of us. If we had it our way.

Perhaps maybe if we were so ill or something else, but if things were our way, we would want to live forever. But Allah has a place for us way better than this place here. And He wants us to go there in a way that He's just going to take us there.

You know, people say, I want paradise, I want paradise, I want to go to paradise. I ask you a show of hands, who wants to go to paradise? Put up your hand. That's the entire hall here, (مَا شَاءَ الله - ma sha'a Allah).

Well, to get there, you need to die. (لا إله إلا الله - la ilaha illallah). Who wants to die? No one.

Our Duty to Help Others

I tell you what, it's our duty to take care of the life we have. And on top of that, it's our duty to be merciful towards others, especially those who don't have what we have. So if someone doesn't have the strength you have, help them with your strength.

Someone doesn't have the wealth you have, help them with the wealth you have. Someone doesn't have, for example, the food you have, reach out to them with a bit of food. Someone doesn't have the knowledge you have, spend some time teaching them.

That's the Almighty's plan. For as long as you are occupied in assisting another, the Almighty will be assisting you:

(Sahih Muslim Hadith 2699)

The Prophet, peace be upon him says, the Almighty will continue helping his slave for as long as that slave is continually, or for as long as that slave continues to help another.

Amazing. Who do I help? How many do I help? Let's get back to the mercy of the mother. That mercy is unique, it's amazing.

And that's why there is a great reward to return the favor. When someone does good to you, you're supposed to be doing goodness back to them:

Is the recompense of goodness anything besides goodness? That's a question asked in the Quran.

Which means, if you want to recompense someone who did good to you, you have to do good back to them. And I normally say to people, in this world that we're living in today, we don't really need the return favor as much as we simply need them not to harm us. There was a time when we used to say, your friends are those who help you.

Now we say, your friends are actually those who don't harm you. Right? Because sometimes you do good to someone, people are quick to forget. May Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى grant us ease, grant us goodness.

Ameen.

True Love of the Maker

My brothers, my sisters, when we develop ourselves, and when we understand the purpose of our existence on earth, over and above worshipping the Almighty, and preparing for the day that we meet the Almighty, we must refine ourselves. I'm here this evening to tell you, you need to promise yourself that you will be the best version of you from this day on, because you don't have much time left on earth.

You have to leave a mark. You have to leave a legacy. You have to understand what is the divine wisdom.

You are here not only to worship the Almighty, but at the same time to acknowledge and respect and fulfill the rights of the rest of the creatures of the same Almighty. That's amazing. People say, I love Allah.

I love my Maker. I pray. I give charity.

I actually fast. I've been for hajj. I do a lot of good deeds.

I stay away from a lot of bad. But you know what? If you have hurt people's feelings, uttered racist remarks, or you are a racist, or you have within you that which is negative against people, you treat people very badly, and so on. You harm, you hurt, you deceive.

You're filled with jealousy, deception, etc. You need to know, you haven't yet loved your Maker, because you don't love what your Maker's made. You have a company, a big company.

And (مَا شَاءَ الله - ma sha'a Allah) the owner of the company is your friend. Wouldn't you be proud of the growth of that company? Every time you see something connected to that company somewhere, even if it's just a truck passing with that little logo, you would be so excited, right? To say, hey, that's my friend's company, man. The biggest company.

You know, we were in school together. Today he's the richest man in Australia. You would be so excited, right? Even if he didn't share his billions with you.

You'd still be happy right والله, that's a sign of connection. Because you're friends. You're connected to anything connected to your friend.

When you make the Maker Himself your friend, you become automatically connected to everything the same Maker has made. You start respecting people. You know why? Because you truly love your Maker.

He made that person. He made this person. He made those people.

He made the others. He made those who belong to your race. Those who don't belong to your race.

Another race. Those who come from another part of the globe. Those who follow your faith.

Those who perhaps don't follow your faith. Those who agree with you. Those who don't agree with you.

Those who've chosen differently from you. Etc, etc. All of them are made by the same Maker.

You love that Maker. You will reach out to them in the best possible way. Minimum is, you won't harm them.

Why? Hey, this is a creature of the Maker. I'm just proving my love to. Amazing.

We tend to forget this. This is something we tend to forget. It extends way beyond human beings.

The Maker did not just make human beings. The Maker made animals too. And not only animals and birds.

But plantation too. The plants. The sea.

The ocean. Everything. You would be concerned about your ecosystem.

Because that ecosystem is made by the Maker. If I were to just destroy the ecosystem, What love have I shown to my Maker who made that ecosystem?

The oceans. Contaminated.

The air. Polluted. And I'm claiming to love Allah.

And I don't even care. True love of the Maker extends way beyond just your five daily prayers. Way beyond just giving a charity and forgetting about your character, your conduct, refining yourself.

Animals and Human Rights

If we are people who are not allowed to harm others, downstream, if we are upstream with the water that is going down, do you really think that the Almighty would let us be without being concerned about others or the animals? I'm sure you've heard of the narrations where a man entered paradise simply because he quenched the thirst of a dog. A woman entered paradise for a similar reason. And there is another narration to say a woman was punished because she punished a cat.

(سُبْحَانَ اللهِ - subhanAllahi). Doesn't that show you that if Islam and the Maker Himself have warned you about being unkind and given so much importance to animals and the treatment of animals that the treatment of human beings who disagree with you is far more important than how you treated the animals, the cats and the dogs (سُبْحَانَ اللهِ - subhanAllahi).

May Allah grant us understanding. So I am here to remind myself and yourselves to refine yourselves. The only way we're going to leave a legacy or understand the divine legacy is to be in love with the one who is the source of that divinity.

That's the Almighty. True love of the Almighty is not that you're sitting with your Quran all day and you're just reading it without having refined yourself.

Paradise and Character

This is why when the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him was asked, Oh messenger, tell us about paradise.

I asked you moments ago who wants to go to paradise? We all want to go to paradise. Tell us about paradise. Tell us what are the characteristics of the people who will be entering that place.

You know what he said تَقْوَى اللهِ وَحُسْنُ الْخُلْقِ - Jami at-Tirmidhi Hadith 2004

The development of the correct relationship with your maker and the greatness of your character and conduct. Two things.

If you can develop your relationship with your maker, it means you've become conscious of your maker. Consciousness of your maker is translated in the Arabic language as Taqwa. Taqwa would also mean to fear your maker out of love.

You might want to know what that means. I explained it a few days ago. I think I should say it again, right? Because people say, fear Allah, fear Allah.

When they say fear Allah, what exactly do they mean? I had a child come to me and that's when we went in and studied the entire matter and came up with the correct response. The child says, but I love Allah so much. Why should I be scared of Him? It's a good question, isn't it? How can we be scared of Allah? Is He going to attack us or something? And I said, hang on, hang on, hang on.

تقوى الله does include, yes, the fear of Allah to a certain extent, but not from the perspective of being frightened, but rather from the perspective of immense love. When you love someone so much, you fear to do anything that will damage that love or relationship, right? I love you so much, so much, that I'm worried about doing or saying anything that's going to spoil this relationship, right? So it is a fear that's born out of love, not out of anger or anything else, right? This is taqwa. I love Allah.

I don't want to do anything that will earn His wrath. I want to make sure that whatever I do is good. That's why I say, the only people who respect others and other creatures are those who are truly conscious of the fact that the same Maker who fashioned me, designed me, and made me has fashioned them, designed them, made them, and He has them here for a purpose.

Violence and Respect

I address those who engage in violence by telling them, you know what? If you believe the Almighty created you to come out and kill others or hurt others, then you've undermined the power of the same Maker, the one who will take my life away and yours when the time is right, and you think that He has mandated you to do that. May Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى grant us understanding. These are deep words.

People say, well, you know, Muslims have no respect for others. I tend to believe there is room for improvement indeed. My brothers and sisters, I was given 20 minutes, but I tell you what, I'm taking the liberty in this city, because of the surname of the city, to increase a few minutes.

We'll still get to the airport, (إن شاء الله - in sha'a Allah). I just want to say one more thing, and that is, my brothers, my sisters, when we reach out to others, let's make sure we do it with humbleness, with humility, for the sake of the Maker, in order really to purify ourselves.

True Charity and Giving

In Islam, we believe when you give, you're actually purifying yourself, because when you start loving material things too much, you tend to become selfish, and you don't realize the rights of those around you who have less than you.

If Allah wanted, He would have given them much more than you and I. But Allah wanted to watch you, to look at you, to see what you do, to give you a chance to prove yourself. Who provided for me? Allah. Who provided for you? Allah.

He's known as the nourisher, cherisher, sustainer, provider, protector, curer. He is the one who sustains, He provides for, right? He gave me, if He wanted, He could have given the poor person or the one struggling far more than me, but He didn't because He wants to watch what I do, and at the same time watch what they do. So if I'm going to reach out, Oh Allah, you gave me, I'm going to give half of what I have, a tenth of what I have, 5% of what I have, 2.5% of what I have to the poor.

And I'm going to do it not because I want to clock mileage and say, right, I'm the guy who gave you. You know you, you're living because I gave you food. That's attitude.

The Almighty doesn't want attitude. That's not called clean giving. You give in such a way that your left hand does not know what your right hand has spent, right? Unless (سُبْحَانَ اللهِ - subhanAllahi) if you're in a crowd of this nature, where there is a fundraiser, for example, and you want to give in order to encourage others, in order, for example, to be able to give so that people are motivated and so on, to meet a target.

It's not wrong, but if people are actually giving out of pride, I'm the one who gave, I did this. No, no, no, relax. If the Almighty wanted, He wouldn't have given you.

Amazing. So when we give people, let's learn to give them with respect and understand the Almighty will give you back. He will definitely give you back.

Last night I spoke in another city and I said, when we give and when we've pledged, the Almighty will give us to give. If I have taken it upon myself to, for example, sponsor 20 orphans, and I'm spending so many thousand every month on those orphans, I'm talking of those who (مَا شَاءَ اللۂ - ma sha'a Allah) they have a bit of wealth, even if it's one orphan. And we're giving so much.

The Almighty has written their sustenance and it's coming through you because you've pledged it, so the Almighty has to give you to give them, so you've just opened your doors. You see the point? You've just

opened your doors. And that's why the hadith, where a man came complaining about his brother, that I'm spending on my brother and I'm spending so much and he's doing nothing and he's not working and how long