They Are Allah's Wake-Up Call to You | Jumu'ah Khutbah | Dr. Omar Suleiman

Opening Supplications

Ameen, Ya Rabbal Alameen.

Amma ba'd. We begin by praising Allah. By bearing witness that none has the right to be worshipped or unconditionally obeyed except for Him. And we bear witness that Muhammad ﷺ is his final messenger. We ask Allah to send his peace and blessings upon him, the prophets and messengers that came before him, his family and companions that served alongside him, and those that follow in his blessed path until the Day of Judgement. And we ask Allah to make us amongst them. Allahumma ameen.

The Concept of the Wake-Up Call in the Quran

Dear brothers and sisters, if I was to ask you: what is the word for "wake-up call" in the Quran? You might say various things that come straight to mind, because Allah speaks of this idea of the ayat of Allah — through the stories and the verses and the lessons in the Quran — as being meant to inject into us a sense of urgency. And Allah uses different words to describe the nature of different wake-up calls.

I was reading in Surah Ali Imran, and what caught my attention was the way that Allah uses almost two identical words for what are situations where Allah is telling us to wake up and to ponder deeply on either what we are perceiving or what we are seeing.

The People of Deep Remembrance: أُولُو الْأَلْبَابِ

On the first page of Surah Ali Imran, Allah says:

And no one is able to remember properly except for أُولُو الْأَلْبَابِ — people who have this deep sense of perception. They're people of deep remembrance. They're people who clear their minds. And so when they hear any reminder, they immediately connect it to their own lives and they reconnect to Allah and it brings you back to your core over and over and over again, putting you in a state of remembrance constantly. The nature of a tathkira — the nature of something that reminds — is that it's something you already know, but it reminds you of Allah.

The People of Deeper Insight: أُولُو الْأَبْصَارِ

On the next page, Allah mentions:

When two armies met one another — one group fighting in the path of Allah and another group fighting — they appeared to be double in number. And Allah gives victory to whom He wills, for people who have deep insight. And so the word that's used is عِبْرَة.

I want you to think about this — every time you now hear this word being used in the Quran — عِبْرَة: wake-up call, wake-up call, wake-up call — and how specific it actually is.

Allah mentions الذِّكْرَى — remembrance in the general sense — and things are meant to bring us back to Allah. But there are things that happen in front of you, things that you can see. If you're someone that's plugged in to what is pleasing to Allah, then anything that you hear of Allah immediately puts you in the zone and causes you to go into a state of deep reflection. But when Allah points out people that you can see, or nations that came to pass, or different examples that are so obvious to the eye — but if someone is blinded from the spiritual reality of their existence, they won't be able to see — Allah uses this word عِبْرَة.

And I was thinking about how Allah says:

"So wake up, O people of الأبصار." الْبَصِيرَة is when you look at something and you see its deeper reality. الْبَصَر is your sight; بَصِيرَة is deeper insight. You can look at something and you can derive more from it because you're paying deeper attention. So two people can be reading the same book — one of them can take no lesson from it whatsoever, the other one can see something profound. Two people can be looking at what's happening in Gaza and walk away with completely different conclusions or completely different reflections. You could see someone who has fallen from grace, someone that is away from Allah, and one person walks away mocking, the other person walks away reflecting. They're looking at the same thing, but the difference is whether or not they're from أُولِي الْأَبْصَارِ — people of deeper insight.

How عِبْرَة Appears in the Quran

Allah invokes this concept of عِبْرَة when He talks about nations before you that were destroyed. After Allah tells us in Surah An-Nazi'at about the destruction of Fir'aun:

That's a wake-up call for a person who's paying attention, for a person who's in awe of Allah — that Fir'aun, while he was a man in a very particular time, a tyrant in a particular time, there are Fir'auns in every nation and there are people that display Fir'aunic behavior in every single context. And beware of having Fir'aunic behavior and being dealt with by Allah in the same way Fir'aun was dealt with.

Allah also mentions:

That in the stories of the prophets that came before you there is a عِبْرَة — there is a wake-up call, there is a wisdom, there is something you should be paying attention to.

From Observation to Transformation

I'll give you one more layer to this definition, and then I want to bring it to our reality. The scholars of the Arabic language say that عِبْرَة is when you see something that happens and it causes you الانتقال من حال إلى حال — it causes you to move from one state to another. It's not just مُشَاهَدَة — it is تَغَيُّر. You go from observation to transformation, to actually changing yourself. So you didn't just witness something, but you witnessed something in a way that made you wake up to your own reality, and you said: wait, this is actually talking to me. Allah is not just talking about past nations, Allah is not just talking about past prophets, Allah is not just talking about people in the past or things that happened in the past. Allah is talking to me about me.

So it takes you from الْمُشَاهَدَة — just seeing something — to a تَغَيُّر, to transforming yourself. And that's why some of the scholars of the language say: if you look at the word bridge — مَعْبَر — it comes from the same root. You go from one place to another. So these are stories not to entertain you when they're talking about the past, but also in your present reality.

The عِبْرَة in the People Around You

And this is where I really want us to pay attention — to the people that Allah puts around us and the multiple stories that Allah puts around us. SubhanAllah, social media today is filled with the أَخْبَار of others — the news of others. So even if you are locked up in a home, even if you have no social life, you're constantly exposed to everybody's relationship difficulties, to everybody's recent change in their lives, to entire populations that are wiped out, to victims and villains. You're constantly exposed to other people's news.

Now, your algorithm will give you what it thinks you're interested in. And there's something terrifying about that, because the things that tend to drive our reactions tend to be things that are far less significant than things that actually matter in the world. And that's a sign of what the عِبْرَة your algorithm thinks is for you — your algorithm thinks you have a عِبْرَة, a particular thing to change your behavior, and it wants to feed that behavior and give you something.

But you're constantly exposed to: did you hear what happened to this person? You don't even need someone else to tell you anymore — you already see it, it shows up on your newsfeed constantly. And even if you're not someone on social media, the gossip in our communities is non-stop: did you hear what happened to this person's marriage? Did you hear what happened to this person's job? Did you hear that this person did this and this person did that? We're constantly exposed to other people in their lowest states.

The عِبْرَة is for you, though. When Allah shows you what's happening to other people, the عِبْرَة is for you. The wake-up call is for you. And you're supposed to be a person of بَصِيرَة — you're supposed to be a person who's deriving insight from everything that's happening around you.

Don't Judge — Study the Trajectory

Now someone might say: well, that means if I'm looking at someone that went astray, I'm going to be very judgmental of that person. If I'm looking at someone who got caught up in the money and they started to slowly relinquish their deen or they sold their principles for a meager profit — then I'm going to start judging that person. Or if I'm talking about someone that stopped coming to the masjid — I'm going to start judging that person. I don't want to look too deeply at what's happening to other people.

But there's a difference. When you look at people that have fallen, or people that have ended up in negative outcomes, you're looking at them not to evaluate them but to actually evaluate yourself. You're looking at them not to pass a judgment on their outcome but to study their trajectory — how they got there — and then ask yourself: am I following the same trajectory?

So if someone else followed this trajectory — as an individual, or as a family, or as a community — you know, mashallah, everyone talks about Valley Ranch Islamic Center, our community is this, our community is that, may Allah protect it, may Allah protect all the communities that are out there. When you hear something that happened to another community, you could mock it, or you could study the trajectory and say: how do we make sure our masjid never becomes that way?

When you hear something — because we're all in each other's business constantly — when you hear something that happened to someone else's family, a marriage fell apart, a parent and a child fell apart, something happened in a household, someone else's household — you don't study it to mock it. You don't look at it and say: well, that's just terrible, you know, I always knew something was off about this person and that person. You look at it and you look at the trajectory, and you take the ibra: what's something I can take from that and look at my household and make sure it doesn't become that household? What's the عِبْرَة that Allah is giving to me?

When you look at the individual that has — at least in the present tense — seemingly gone astray, or done something very haram, or fallen in a state of oppressing someone else, you don't look at them to say that that person is less than you and that person is going to hell and you're going to heaven because you're not that person. You look at that and you say: how did that person get there? There's a trajectory, there's something that happened, and I want to know how I can make sure it doesn't happen to me.

You Don't Know Their تَوْبَة, Their نِهَايَة, or Their حَال

SubhanAllah — when it comes to how you look at other people, you don't know their تَوْبَة — you don't know whether they've repented or whether they will repent. You don't know their نِهَايَة — you don't know their ending. They might end up dying as the most pious of people, using what has happened as a catalyst to bring them back to Allah. And third, you don't even know their حَال — you don't know their present state, what Allah sees in them now that you can't see in them. Because even the angels can't see certain things about us. Perhaps Allah saw something in that woman of Bani Israel who was an adulteress that would inspire her towards tawba, towards repentance, because there was something inside of her that would click in the right moment.

So you're not looking at someone else and saying: that happened to them, this person is done — or this person even now is worse than me. There might be something about that person right now that makes them better in the sight of Allah. The ibra is to study the trajectory — why are they in that behavior or in that state right now? Allah is sending you the sign, Allah is sending me the sign. The عِبْرَة is for us. The lesson is for us.

Don't Follow the Footsteps

Some of the ulama even comment on:

"Do not follow the footsteps of Shaitan" — this doesn't just mean that the traps have been laid. It means that someone else has walked that trap before you. So there are observable footsteps not to follow, in order not to end up in the same place. How did this person fall into zina? How did this person fall into infidelity? Well, there is a trajectory — and if you are observing the same trajectory in yourself, then don't be surprised when you end up in the same outcome.

How did that person become addicted to money and a slave to their wealth —

— as it appears? Well, there is a trajectory. Am I acting in the exact same way in my own business practices? How did that community get to this? How did that family get to this? Study trajectories and take their ibra. The fact that Allah gave you the eyes to see it means that He has also given you the potential to truly perceive it, so that you take the lesson and you don't fall.

And so the Quran constantly says فَاعْتَبِرُوا, فَاعْتَبِرُوا, إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَعِبْرَةً — take the bridge. You don't want to be like Bani Israel, you don't want to be like Fir'aun, you don't want to be like 'Ad and Thamud. You want to be like Nuh, you want to be like Musa, you want to be like these prophets, you want to be like Ashab al-Ukhdood, you want to be like Ashab al-Kahf. Constantly Allah is saying: pay attention to the ibra. The Quran is not a book about the stories of other people — it's a book about what your story could end up looking like, depending on how you respond to the revelation and how you end up defining your future trajectory.

Don't Become the عِبْرَة — Be the إِمَام

Now I want to say one last thing here. When Ibrahim alayhi assalam taught us the du'a — or rather, Allah teaches us this idea of:

"Oh Allah, don't make us a fitna to those who disbelieve" — there is a very specific manifestation of that: that because of our own states we end up being defeated by those who disbelieve, and they would think that they are upon the truth because of how easily victory is coming to them.

And رَبَّنَا لَا تَجْعَلْنَا فِتْنَةً لِّلَّذِينَ آمَنُوا — don't let my behavior end up leading someone else to a negative behavior. That means setting the trends. And when the Prophet ﷺ says that every single murder goes back to Qabil, and a share of the sin goes back to the original murder, because he was أَوَّلُ مَنْ سَنَّ الْقَتْلَ — he was the first one to set the trend — that's one way of being a fitna, someone follows your behavior.

There's a third thing here, which is: oh Allah, don't make me the عِبْرَة for someone else in the negative sense. You hear stories about people in سُوءِ الْخِتَام — stories of people who had evil endings — and we hear them in the مَوَاعِظ, in the lessons of mashayikh and people of da'wa and people that have dealt with communities, who will tell you the stories of people who had سُوءُ الْخِتَام, who had evil endings — may Allah protect us — people who wronged and people who did this and people who refused to listen to rightful guidance.

Oh Allah, don't make me that type of عِبْرَة. Instead you want to be what Ibrahim alayhi assalam taught us:

"Let us instead be leaders of khayr" — leaders of good, stories of what it looks like to grab on to the rope of Allah and to pull yourself up to the salvation that He has made possible for all of us, if we listen. Instead be إِمَامًا, not عِبْرَة. Be someone who is actually going to be a feel-good story, a success story.

Learning from Failure, Not Just Success

Now, in order for us to not become that عِبْرَة, we kind of need both in our lives. SubhanAllah, I don't remember who said this or where I heard this, but it was something very insightful: imagine if all of the seminars and master classes and webinars and whatever else you want to call them — where we study the lives of people — imagine if we had people that failed, people whose lives were ruined, teaching those seminars. Seminars on how I failed, master classes on everything not to do. We don't do that. We always have the success stories, and people give you the celebrated and decorated résumé of everything that they've accomplished in life.

There is some good in that — there is some good in studying success. There is also good in studying failure and making sure you don't pursue the same process of failure. I don't know what this person's ending will be. I don't know what this family's ending will be. I don't know what this masjid's ending will be. I don't know what this country's ending will be. I don't know what this ummah's ending will be — in the immediate sense, I don't know what it's all going to look like. But I know what it looks like right now, and I know that Allah is telling me something by the way that it looks like.

Pay attention. إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَعِبْرَةً — wake up. It's a call for you. The fact that Allah exposed you to it means that Allah wants you to take something from it.

If You Are Already the عِبْرَة

The last thing I'll say here, dear brothers and sisters — just in case you're like: well, I actually am already that ibra, I've already fallen, I've already been the example of this, I've already been the example of that. How many people who became imams of good were once ibras of sharr, of evil? There are so many stories throughout our Islamic history of people that were in impossible states, where this was the story that you never wanted to be — but Allah inspired them towards better versions of themselves and turned them into the complete opposite. And those are the best stories.

You open the ayah in Surah Al-Hadid:

"Is it not time for those who believe to humble their hearts to the remembrance of Allah and what He has revealed of the truth?" Read the stories of Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak, of Malik ibn Dinar, of al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyyad — all these people who were lowly, lowly people: drunks, adulterers, in some cases even murderers, who completely turned their lives around and became the imams of us today. Not the ibra of sharr, not the example of evil, the wake-up call of evil — but instead stories of salvation. Because Allah has not made us irredeemable so long as we're still alive. And that's the rahma behind the ibra. The rahma behind the ibra — He gives you these wake-up calls out of mercy, so that you don't relegate yourself and shut your book and say that it's done. It's not done.

Lastly — don't assign something that happened to you outside of character, just as circumstance, as Allah making you a lesson for someone else. Perhaps it is the resilience in that circumstance or that difficulty that was visited upon you despite good behavior that makes you an imam for someone else — on how to have patience in difficult moments, and how to maintain your faith and your character and your dignity even when things fall apart all around you.

Closing Du'a

May Allah allow us to be amongst those who heed the wake-up calls and who wake up others by heeding the wake-up calls. May Allah make us imams in khayr — people who lead in good — and not make us examples or lessons in evil and punishment. May Allah give us victory over our enemies, victory over our oppressors. May Allah protect our ummah, protect our communities, protect our families and protect us from the spiritual diseases that erode all good. May Allah protect our families and our communities and protect us all. Ameen.