Captioning provided by MUHSEN (www.muhsen.org)
And then, it just kind of became repetitive
right after each other.
And all of a sudden,
I thought the floor underneath me was going to drop.
And, I jumped out of the room.
And I heard a big crash.
A chandelier shaking
and I look into the room and I'm like,
"Okay, nothing fell, what happened?"
(rumbling sound)
And then, it dawned on me, it was downstairs
where my mom is.
(dramatic music) (swooshing sound)
(clicking noise)
Allahummakfinee bihalaalika 'An haraamik
Wa Aghninee bifadlika 'amman siwaak
- So, one of the things about Ibrahim 'Alayhi Salaam
is he is the perpetual refugee.
And you know they have that shirt that I've seen,
you know, Abraham was a migrant.
- [Dr. Omar] Mh.
- 'Alayhi Salaam, Moses was a migrant.
'Alayhi Salaam, 'Isa 'Alayhi Salaam Jesus was a migrant.
Muhammad SallAllahu 'Alaihi Wasallam was a migrant
or a refugee right,
like this idea of connecting to them,
like with Ibrahim 'Alayhi Salaam, you go from Iraq,
and then Egypt, and then Palestine,
and then Mecca, and then back.
And it's not just that, right,
with every single move of his,
he's leaving behind something as well.
Family, stability, possessions, right?
There's a story when you start to build a home.
Can any of you relate specifically?
Do you have a refugee story in your own family
or a migration story in your own family
where that stability was taken away,
and, you know it dawned upon you or it dawned upon them,
this idea that stability
is being found in Allah's Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la
rather than those places.
- I think for me personally, you know, who've dealt
with this quite a bit growing up,
my dad was in the government back home in Mali.
And, seems like these African countries,
there's coups after coups every few years.
So this was in the 1990's,
there was a coup.
And so, the government was overthrown.
I mean we were living a pretty decent lifestyle.
I mean just overnight, everything changed.
You know they came, they burned down the houses,
and we,
Alhamdulillah, you know,
we were able to kinda get out of the house on time.
And then we had to leave the country.
Go to, and this was, you know,
we're still pretty young kids,
so in the middle of the school year,
we had to go to a different country,
and kinda start over, get into a,
the whole different school system.
And few years later we went back to Mali,
you know, things kinda of got a little bit stable,
and then, you know, few years later again,
the same thing happened.
You know another turmoil happens,
and you have the scores of people,
populations, cities, villages,
just kind of moving. - Mh.
- Out of the country, and you know moving
to Mauritania, or Algeria.
And some of them are still there.
Whenever I go back home and try to visit these places its,
you know, they live in tents,
you know, no water, they
But just few years before that, they had total safety
and I know this is just not Mali, this is happening
all over the world.
And it just gives you that appreciation
of, you know, just safety and all.
But at the same time,
you always have in the back of your mind,
you know, this can all go in one day.
- Mh.
- And that's kind of my take on that,
you know, just looking at Ibrahim moving from one place
to the other.
And but again, bringing it back to the hope part,
you know, things will get better one day,
and if it's not in this dunyaa, insha Allah yawm al qiyaama
- Allah relates the experience of being a refugee to death
Allah Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la says
Wa law annaa katabnaa 'alaihim aniqtulooo anfusakum
aw ikhrujoo min diyaarikum
If we were to prescribe upon them to kill yourselves
or to leave your homes.
Some of the 'Ulamaa, the scholars say, SubhanAllah,
"To leave your home can be like death."
And truly,
You look at the Prophet SallAllahu 'Alaihi Wasallam
and his companions,
and this moment of heart break, as amazing as Medina was,
it's not Mecca,
and the Prophets SallAllahu 'Alaihi Wasallam turns around
and he looks at Mecca and he's very emotional.
And he says to Mecca, he's speaking to it,
"Oh Mecca, Innaki Ahabbu bilaadillahi ilayya
You are the most beloved of places on Earth to me."
And the most beloved of places on Earth to Allah.
"Had your people", SubhanAllah he's speaking to Mecca,
"Had your people not run me out,
I would have never left you, I would have never left you"
And you have Bilal radiAllahu 'Anhu
and Abu Bakr radiAllahu ta'ala 'Anhu.
I mean talking about death as soon as they get to Medina,
writing poetry about how much they miss Mecca,
eating sick, homesick, literally.
It's amazing because you then look at,
and it matches with the experience when you talk to people,
I've been through that like, you then look
at the emphasis in the Quran on providing warmth to people.
You know, to the orphan, to the wayfarer,
to that person who's in that experience, that ikraam
that honoring of them, the way the unsought honored
the Prophet SallAllahu 'Alaihi Wasallam and the companions.
So that they don't feel like a burden, they feel a sense
of stability, you're home, you're home, welcome home.
Right, that love that's so necessary,
it's not just food and drink.
And in the case of Ibrahim 'Alayhi Salaam,
who's welcoming Ibrahim 'Alayhi Salaam,
when he gets to these places?
Either a tyrant or nobody.
- Hm. - Right?
He's either being welcomed by a tyrant
or you know, a baron does it.
And so he has to find that comfort and that stability
only in Allah's Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la.
You know, have any of you ever felt like,
when have you felt
that Allah's Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la gave you stability.
When the ground underneath you,
you know, in the case of a refugee, literally,
the ground underneath you changes.
You're pulled off of the ground underneath you.
But the ground is being pulled from underneath you.
Have you ever felt a moment of stability
in Allah's Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la, anything from the Quran,
or from the stories of these Prophets
that really resonates with you in that sense?
- Two Ramadans ago,
I was upstairs trying to reorganize a room.
And, I started hearing this noise.
It was like a tap-tap-tap.
And I was like "What is my mom doing downstairs?"
And she's thinking the same thing downstairs.
She's like "What is that noise?"
And it just kinda became repetitive right after each other,
and all of a sudden, I thought the floor underneath me
was going to drop.
And I jumped outta the room.
And I heard a big crash.
A chandelier shaking,
and I look into the room and I'm like,
"Okay, nothing fell, what happened?"
And then it dawned on me it was downstairs
where my mom is.
SubhanAllah
- And I just ran downstairs, and you know,
you're mind's gonna be flooded with everything wrong
and everything bad.
And I'm just literally, I have to say no, no, no out loud
just to shut those thoughts outta the way,
and I come down,
and I'm not saying that I'm not trying to belittle
what somebody who's been a refugee has experienced,
but it looked like a war-torn space.
Just dust everywhere, the entire ceiling fell.
And I couldn't see anything, I couldn't figure out,
I did not look like my living room,
and I said to my mom,
"Mom, mom?"
And she's like, in a quiet voice,
"Yeah?"
(laughing)
"Where are you?"
And she's like,
"I don't know where you are but I'm on the couch."
(laughing)
"Where?"
And I realize that there is a part of, this is,
some of the old houses at least.
- [Dr. Omar] Mh.
- Have like this double-stuffed cement wall.
And it had two plies netted with wire,
exactly tented
over my mom.
(Dr. Omar Suleiman mutters)
Everything else, it's broken and in pieces everywhere else.
And it's in the perfect shape over my mom.
- [Dr. Omar] Mh, mh.
- And I get in there, and of course I'm scared
that more was going to fall.
And I wasn't even paying attention,
I didn't realize there were shards of glass all over,
I had no idea, and I ran in,
and I was just struggling trying to tear off the cement,
and finally took her out, and we went,
and I'm like,
"Like what just happened?"
SubhanAllah
And that immediacy of not safe to you know,
to being safe,
was just kind of surreal, to this point I'm still like,
I mean, Alhamdilillah,
it's from Allah Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la,
that Allah safeguarded her.
But this was a very trying experience for us.
- Mh. - And it took us a whole year
to be able to fix
what the damage that had happened,
which meant that we were living literally in one room,
the entire year.
And so, that instability is, it really shakes you,
it can rock you in so many, ways,
that you don't, your functionality is almost like,
kind of like what I was mentioning in the past
of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs,
you're only trying to focus on your safety, you know.
- One of the things from a spiritual perspective,
beyond just connecting
to those that are refugees in this world,
you know Imam Al Jawzi Rahimahullahu ta'aalaa
has this really interesting thing,
he says that, you know,
"The believers homesick for jannah".
You're homesick for paradise.
Like if you look at the ahadith
of the Prophet SallAllahu 'Alaihi Wasallam,
when he says, "Be in this world as if you were a stranger
or a wayfarer, kun fiddunyaa ka-annaka ghareeb ."
Be as if you are a stranger, 'aabir sabeel, a wayfarer.
You know, and he said that,
"The example of me in this dunyaa
is like a person who's just
is on a journey and you take a break under a tree."
And that idea, that, you know, in this dunyaa,
you're never really satisfied,
just like the refugee, no matter what you give them,
in terms of luxuries, or if you give them a nicer house,
and better accommodations, like objectively speaking,
Medina is nicer than Mecca right?
Palm trees versus barren desert, you know?
No matter what you give them, it's not home,
and the believer always feels that sense
of being homesick from jannah.
Like, I was not created for this world,
I was created for jannah,
and aims to get back home,
and sort of sees this world as merely a pause
in that journey, and so, any pause
within that journey, is still just a pause within a pause,
as opposed to any semblance of stability,
which as believers, we really only seek in the hereafter.
So sister Sarah,
unpredictability is a part of everybody's life.
Maybe not to the extreme of Ibrahim 'Alayhi Salaam life,
but how do we cope with unpredictability in life?
- Unpredictability is something that is inevitable.
It's a part of our lives whether, a lot of times
we don't realize that it's a part of our daily lives,
but it absolutely is.
You know SubhanAllah like you take the same route
on your way to work or school everyday,
and then one day you get into a car accident.
You know, that unpredictability, we have this misconception,
that our lives are predictable,
if we do the same thing each day,
then the same thing will happen,
but that's just not the reality of life,
and we see it at different stages of our own lives,
where that fact is amplified.
You know, when Covid hit, it was amplified
in everybody's lives, the unpredictability.
When somebody transitions from being,
you know, from pregnancy to becoming a parent,
that unpredictability that then results, you know,
the different things that somebody who you love passes away,
there's so much unpredictability in our lives,
we just don't always expect it,
and that's what makes it unpredictable.
But the story of Ibrahim 'Alayhi Salaam,
and I often think about his wife Hajar,
and the unpredictability
of, you know, one morning you wake up,
and you're life is as you expect it to be,
and then by the end of the day,
you're in the middle of the desert with your baby,
and nothing around you.
SubhanAllah is there anything more unpredictable
than that?
And that perpetual refugee status that you mentioned
that Ibrahim 'Alayhi Salaam has.
So how do we deal with the inevitable,
unpredictability in our lives?
Number one is to accept the fact that life is unpredictable.
And then, you know, and to realize
that the Rasool SallAllahu 'Alaihi Wasallam tells us,
"You tie your camel,
and you trust in Allah Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la",
and that's the best antidote to deal with unpredictability,
is you do your part, you take every moment,
as if it's your last moment.
You take advantage of five before five,
as the Prophet SallAllahu 'Alaihi Wasallam said,
"Because you have time now, you won't have time later.
You have youth now you won't have youth later."
And so doing the most with every moment,
and then when things happen,
that you can't control, that you just have to accept.
How do we do that?
Is that's where we trust in Allah Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la.
That we realize that in every single moment,
we are already trusting in him.
That we have the air in our lungs that
Allah Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la allows to come into our lungs,
That this is an active trust
that we have to have, Allah Subh'anahu Wa Ta-A'la.
And then finally to, one of the things
that I find really helpful is the dhikr
of Allahu Akbar, "That Allah is greater".
Allah is greater than what?
Allah is greater than everything,
every source of unpredictability
that we might be going through,
every difficulty that we might be going through.
And to remember that, can also be really helpful
in dealing with the inevitable unpredictability
that we're going to face.
- So do you remember a time where you felt homesick?
And have you ever felt homesick for jannah?
Please share with us in the comments below.
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