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The original love that Allah guided us to is not a love of making someone feel good, is a love of giving someone what they need to hear. Allah gave us a message that the world needed to hear. This message isn't just another religion. It's the final message from Allah to humanity. It's something humanity was desperately in need of and is still in desperate need of its values, its solutions, its way of looking at the world, its way of solving the world's problems. Subreminal Alumni Fasalalahu Alihi Wasalam wa Allah at Bahihi Khairil Umam Aladina Barak Allah Abdi liyudhirahu Aladini Kulihi Wakafabilahi Shahida lahu Alihi Wasalamatasliman Kathiran Kathira Hadi Muhammad Yomatajidukulunafsima Amilat bin Khairim Muhbara Wama Amilat bin Su Tawadulo Amadam Bharida Rahim in today's khutbah, there are a few subtle things that I'd like to share with you, and I hope I do a good job of articulating them for you because I think they are extremely important for Muslims to understand in any age, and especially ours. The first thing I'd like to share with you is there's a Sunnah of Allah in the way that he cultivated nations and the way he guided humanity. And we all know you've known. Those of you that have been Muslim or raised in a Muslim family know that Allah guided humanity by way of prophets. What Allah does is he sends these prophets and those nations. They have one of two reactions. And typically the minority has a reaction of believing in those prophets and the majority doesn't. But when those believers survive and they continue on living as believers even after that Prophet is gone. Like for example, the case study in the Quran. The main case study in the Quran is that of the Israelites, right? Musa is their Prophet. And even after that, there's a continuation of prophets and they survive as a believing community even after the original Prophet that came and delivered them is long gone. When that happens, the original teachings of that Prophet, even though they claim to hold on to them, in a sense they become rusty and they start operating in a way that is not in the spirit of the Prophet that came and taught them those teachings. This is the same tragedy that the Quran claims occurred with the followers of Jesus. It's the same claim. The problem being that Isa came. His most sincere followers, the Hawariyoon, are role models for the Sahaba in the Quran. The Quran describes them as people to look up to and aspire towards. But then Allah also will describe what happened to the people that attribute themselves to Jesus and how they lost their way from the teachings of Jesus himself, that he represented something else. And their followers ended up going in a very different direction, even though they themselves believe very strongly that they are upholding the legacy and the spirit of the message of Jesus. And Allah is not just giving us these lessons for interesting historical fun facts. He's telling us this because we are the recipients of the final message, the revelation given to Muhammad Rasulullah, and he is no longer physically among us. And therefore we are supposed to live up to the legacy that he left behind, just like the followers of Musa were supposed to live up to the followings of the teachings of Musa and the followers of Jesus their way. And for us, it's the final messenger of Allah, Muhammad Rasulullah. So in that vein, we have certain tendencies to fall into a trap where you and I might think we're living up to that legacy when we're not. We might be deluding ourselves in some ways. And Allah does not want us to live in that delusion. He does not want us to live in this sort of assumption that everything's okay and we're exactly where we're supposed to be. So that's one subject that I want to briefly touch on, inshallah. But before that is another subject that's kind of related, but on the opposite end, and that is a messenger's relationship with his nation. What is the messenger's relationship with the nation that surrounds them? The story is simple. Every child knows it. A messenger comes, they deliver the message. Most people hate it. Most people ridicule and mock that messenger. They call him names, they even attempt to kill him, etc. All of these things happen, and eventually Allah punishes that nation. But one thing that's often lost in that entire, you know, the oversimplification of these stories is that every messenger had a deep love of their nation. They had a deep and profound love of their nation, Nuh. If you study the story of Nuh in the Quran carefully, you'll find that until the very end of his legacy of 950 years of being humiliated, insulted, rejected at every turn, not by one, by multiple generations, his love of his people didn't go away until the very, very end when it turned into a dua against them. But all of those, the vast majority of those 950 years, he's talking to them Lovingly. And he's even telling Allah I call them night and day, right? And they're the ones who ran from me, suggesting he never ran from them. Even the words, as opposed to right. Disbelievers. Listen. No, no. My people, my people, my people. Every nation, calling their. Every messenger, calling their people that hate him, calling him with the words my nation or my people. So there is a precedent for loving the people around you. And actually, if you didn't grasp it yet, I want to make it clear. The khutbah today is actually about love. And the first kind of love I want to articulate is how today, in our day and age, there's a confused definition of love. When you love someone, that just means they make you feel good and you want to make them feel good. That's love, right? I love this person. I love what they do for me. I love the way they give me gifts. I love the way they look. I love, love, love, love, love, love. And then how do you show them love? You do something that makes them feel good. What will make you happy? If it makes them happy, that means this is an expression of my love for them. If these prophets love their nations and they're delivering this message to these nations, and those nations hate the message. They don't love the message. They hate the message. But we know that Allah chose these messengers for a number of reasons, one of which is no one was more sincerely concerned for their nations than these prophets. No one loves Quraish more. No one wants good for Quraish more than Rasulullah. No one. But yet what he is saying, the message that he's delivering, is not being loved by them, it's being hated by them. If you go by the modern definition, if I keep telling you things you hate right, then you don't love me because you keep annoying me. You keep agitating me. You keep telling me stuff I don't want to hear. I've had enough of you. What kind of toxic love is this? This is the new way of looking at love. But love is actually about giving you. If I care about someone, I. I am going to give them what it is that they need, not what it is that they want. The new definition of love is give me what I want. The original definition of love is Allah will give you what you need, not what you want. A mother will give her sick child medicine. The child will be screaming, kicking, and you're going to have to put that medicine on that child. You're going to put the ointment on the rash. And he's kicking and screaming, why are you hurting me? But it's an act of love. You have to give it, you know? And so with that in mind, I want to just quickly transpose what's happening. One of the trends that's happening, especially in places where Muslims live as a minority, like the United States, and we're not the only place, Canada, Muslims live as a minority, Sri Lanka, Muslims live as a minority. There are many places in the world where Muslims live as a minority. And there tends to be a certain problem. Anytime there's a minority community, they feel like, do we really belong? Are we really part of the larger society? And the larger society almost always creates some kind of a narrative that these people are here, but they're not true Canadians, they're not true Americans, they're not true Sri Lankans. Their loyalties are somewhere else. And somewhere in the back of your conscience, you're like, man, I gotta prove how American I am. I gotta prove that I belong, that I love these people, that I love them. And that sounds like. And somebody could disingenuously use the legacies of prophets. See, prophets love their people, so we love them too. So. And we love them by celebrating with them what they celebrate doing with them, what they do. This is all part of us becoming the American Muslim community, etc, etc, right? So because it's all part of just being a true, genuine part of the nation, part of the country. But actually, the original love that Allah guided us to is not a love of making someone feel good, is a love of giving someone what they need to hear. Allah gave us a message that the world needed to hear. This message isn't just another religion. It's the final message from Allah to humanity. It's something humanity was desperately in need of and is still in desperate need of. Its values, its solutions, its way of looking at the world, its way of solving the world's problems is the only way those problems can be solved. Only Allah could have solved certain problems that humanity was unable to solve for centuries before the coming of Islam. And for until Judgment Day, until the end of this world, humanity will not be able to solve certain problems. Until the word of Allah is sought for its solutions, the final messenger is resorted to for those solutions. Our job isn't to become acceptable. Our job is to demonstrate genuine love to the societies in which we live, which means we have to call out the evils that exist in that society for their own benefit. When a doctor calls out, look, you have some growth, it might be cancerous then the doctor doesn't hate the patient. That's the best thing the doctor has done for the patient. When a teacher is telling the student, look, you're missing a few homework assignments. Two more, you're not going to be able to pass this class. He's not hating the student, he's helping the student. These are not acts of hatred. But somehow we have created a dichotomy. On the one hand, you've got some people that really believe that in order to truly be American, we have to love everything about this country. And that's how we will show how patriotic we are and how much we belong. And on the flip side of it, there's an. To every extreme, there's an opposite, equal, but opposite reaction, right? So you've got another group of people that say, no, no, no, this is a kafir society. These are the kuffar. We have to. Even though their neighbor next to you, you know, Joey, gets out of his house and says, hey, how's it going, Muhammad? But you could say hi to him, but remember, he's a kafir and you have to have bara'ah from him. And your wilayah is only to the believers. And everybody on the street is a kafir and the cashier is a kafir and the, you know, the guy at the gas station is a kafir. And your kafir professor taught you, but, oof. So either you have to love them so much, you have to pretend you're becoming them, or you have to hate them and live like the schizophrenic lifestyle where you have to say, hey, how's it going? I hate you. You're a kafir. You're going to burn a Janam. But you say that inside of your head, right? You turn to the legacy of the prophets, you learn something entirely different. We draw a line on our values and we don't have any reason to hate anyone except when they become enemies of Allah. And you know, in the Quran, if you study Surat al Bhumtahana carefully, one of the most amazing surahs in the Quran to describe loyalty, who is our loyalty to? Who is it not towards? Across the Quran, you will find Allah talking about disbelievers. But it's unique, it's rare actually, that Allah won't just call somebody a disbeliever, they'll call them an enemy of Allah. Enemy of Allah. And you would think, oh, kafir, enemy of Allah, same thing, same. They're not. They're not nuh is giving da'wah to who for all those centuries. Kuffar. He's giving them da'wah as kuffar. But when Allah finally declares them an enemy of Allah, get out of there. No more. A line has been drawn by God himself. Just because someone's a disbeliever doesn't make them an enemy of Allah. That's not what makes them an enemy. There are other lines that have to be crossed before they are in that category. So this oversimplification, what does it do either? And by the way, those people that say let's just be lovey dubby with everybody, let's hug everyone, let's all be one happy family, you know what you end up doing? You also end up hugging and loving and shaking hands with the enemies of Allah. Right? Quran is balanced. This deen is balanced. We don't look at anything in black and white. We have to properly understand the context in which we live. Not everyone outside is your enemy and not everyone outside is your friend. It's just not that simple. It's just not that simple. And the book of Allah and the Sunnah of his messenger did not give us an over simplistic way of understanding the world in which we live. That's one side of it. Now I want to turn quickly in the few minutes that I have to the other side of this problem. The other side of this problem is our love for our Messenger. See, the Quran came at a very special time. It's the final book of Allah. But it came at a very unique time. And it came almost six centuries after Jesus. So even though the message of Jesus in some way, in some proportion was preserved, overall the message of Jesus had also been lost. And the world was dominated by superpowers at the time. And one of the great superpowers of the time was the Roman Empire. That was largely, that had largely adopted the Christian religion as the official religion of the state. And a version of that religion was adopted. So it was no longer the religion of Jesus, it was the religion of the church that was adopted. Now why am I bringing that up? The context today was about love, loving the society in which we love. And now we're switching the subject to loving the prophets. Right? The Jewish people had a certain concept of God. Their concept was God loves us a lot. He considers us so special because of our genetic special nature, because of Abraham's promise. God made a promise to Abraham and through that promise we became special. And now we are born special. We don't have to do anything to earn our special status. It is genetically embedded into our code from God. And that's why God does us these favors. Because God loves us so much. And we love God back also. When he's good to us, when he's good, when God is not good to us, then we turn our back on God too, because he turned his back on us. Because we have this love hate relationship with God. It's a conditional transactional relationship with Allah. When they're in the Diaspora, we're not loving God so much when we've been delivered now, you know, God loves us, we love him back, that sort of thing, Right? And that love hate relationship actually still continues. If you. I've had some interesting conversations with rabbis, with people that are very well educated in the Jewish religion about their relationship with God. And this is a consistent theme. It's not entirely we just love God. It's more complicated than that. And what that basically means is it's transactional. So long as Allah is good to me, I love him. The moment Allah gives me some problems in my life, I don't know what are you doing here? I thought you loved me. Because you know what that definition of love is? Love means you will do everything that makes me happy. Remember the new definition of love? I mean, they've had it for quite some time. The Christian definition of love changed. The Christian definition of love. All of our love needs to be focused on one personality, on Jesus. And why should we love him? Because he's our Savior. If we love him enough, we'll be saved on Judgment Day. We don't have to do anything else. We just have to love him. And loving him will be enough for us to be saved on Judgment Day. Now, when it comes to prophets with the Jewish people, they consider Moses the Lawgiver Musa. But they treat him just like that, just like as a lawgiver. He's great. He got us delivered and all of that, but he's just there to give us the rules. Almost like a delivery service, right? There's not much more. There's no real attachment to him. And the greatest thing he did for us is he got us away from the Pharaoh. But other than that, thank you. Now we get the law from you. And so they don't have this emotional attachment that the Christians do now come to Islam. Allah gave us this religion, and one of its fundamental teachings is loving the messenger of Allah. But what Allah did in this remarkable ayah in Al Imran, because he was talking to the Christians in Al Imran in the beginning, first he said, everyone will stand, will find their deeds in front of Allah. They'll have to face their deeds. Every person is going to find in front of them whatever they did good, whatever they did bad, they're going to find it right in front of them. This undercuts the idea that a prophet will come and say, you don't have to face your deeds. I'll cover for you. I'll be your salvation. No, no, no. You're going to have to stand and deal with what you did yourself. He will wish that there could be a long distance between himself and his deeds. The person on Judgment Day will wish this. And the Christians were feeling secure that they don't have to deal with this. Why? Because the one they love, Jesus, will be in between their deeds and themselves on Judgment Day. And the Jewish people felt God loves us too much. He's not even going to open up our deeds. That's not even going to happen because he loves us so much. And Allah says in this one ayah, he undercuts both philosophies and says, everyone's gonna have to face what they did. And Allah is warning you about himself. You're gonna have to deal with God yourself, individually. This is a God that doesn't love. Then because I thought he loves us, I thought because of his love, we're not gonna be in any trouble. And so it sounds like this is a harsh God. And how does the ayah end? Allah is compassionate to his slaves. To the slaves, Allah says, no, your conceptions of love are wrong. This doesn't take anything away from Allah's love. And then Allah teaches us about loving his Prophet. Sallallahu alaihi wasallam. And he says, tell them, in fact, if you do love Allah, if that is actually the case that you love God, tell them, follow me, step by step. Tiba is actually also when you stick to something, you're doing it. You know the tabi and the branches of a tree, the tabi'were branches that are parallel to each other. Right. And when trees bend and they all bend in the same direction, they're tabi of each other. That's how they would describe them. Right. The idea is we have this loyalty to the messenger of Allah. We have this connection to him, and that is proof to Allah that we actually love Allah. Allah made the proof of loving him, our loyalty and our following of our Prophet. Now come back to the original point that I made, and I'll end this khutbah. The original point that I made was our messenger like in line with all the other prophets, showed us what it means to love a nation. He taught us what it means to love a nation. He taught us what it means to draw a line. We don't have to come up with new lines. We don't have to come up with a new. It's already there. All we now have to do is commit ourselves to following his way. We don't. You know, people talk about loving the messenger so much. And sometimes I listen to it carefully and I say something, something fundamental is missing here. We'll be talking about his status, his maqam with Allah, right in the Quran. There are so many places in the Quran where the status of our messenger has been exalted time and time and time again. One of the core subjects of the Quran is the exalted status of the messenger of Allah. But what did the Quran teach us about all messengers? What makes them lovable is that they deliver Allah's message. They deliver Allah's message and they embody Allah's message. If we become obsessed with the being of Muhammad and at the same time cleverly, we don't talk about the message he represents. We're just talking about his amazing person, his amazing character, his amazing status. What? But we're not talking about his amazing message. The message for which he bled. The message for which the people who otherwise loved him started hating him. The same message that got him expelled from his home. The same message that got him almost killed multiple times on the battlefield. The same message that caused him to be poisoned. That same message that got his family to be involved in humiliation, even that same message that was the cause of the suffering of the messenger of Allah. But he was committed and loyal to that message. Under circumstance, would he compromise that message? When we say we love the messenger of Allah, then Allah says, well, the proof is in the pudding. If you really love Allah, show me how much you follow him. Follow me. What does it mean to follow the messenger of Allah? It means to follow his mission, follow his word, follow the message that he was given. If you and I are not going to commit ourselves to that message, we're not going to, like, you know, become absorbed in that message. Then we don't get to claim that we have love of Allah. Allah took our own versions of the definition of what love means. He washed them away and he gave us one. This is the one Allah will accept. So may Allah accept from all of us. May Allah overlook our shortcomings and endow all of us with a true love of Allah and His messenger by Allah Muhammad. I hope you guys enjoyed that video clip. My team and I have been working tirelessly to try to create as many resources for Muslims to give them free steps in understanding the Quran all the way to the point where they can have a deep, profound understanding of the Quran. We are students of the Qur'an ourselves, and we want you to be students of the Quran alongside us. Join us for this journey on bayinatv.com where thousands of hours of work have already been put in. And don't be intimidated. 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