Friday Khutbah (Mufti Azeem Uddin) - 02/07/2025

Opening Recitation

Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest.

All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Master of the Day of Judgment. It is You we worship and You we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not of those who have incurred Your Wrath, nor of those who have gone astray.

Successful is he who purifies himself and remembers the Name of his Lord, and then prays. Nay, but you prefer the life of this world, and the Hereafter is better and more lasting. Verily, this is in the earlier scriptures, the scriptures of Abraham and Moses.

Allah is the Greatest. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.

Allah is the Greatest.

All praise is due to Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed Satan. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. JazakAllah khair.

Introduction

Mufti Azeemuddin, we are very blessed to have him today for the khutbah and as well tonight insha'Allah. So feel free to join us at 7pm for light snacks followed by Isha and then the lecture by Mufti Azeemuddin insha'Allah after Isha prayer.

Also on Sunday insha'Allah we have two programs at 10 o'clock. Imam Azfaruddin and Dr. Ahmed Suleiman will be giving a practical session on how to perfect your salah and correct any mistakes you have in your salah. So feel free, make sure you benefit from that insha'Allah.

And at noon insha'Allah on Sunday, Dr. Asma Fazle is going to be giving a very good lecture on end of life ethics for Muslim patients. So very important programs, make sure you benefit from them tonight and Sunday insha'Allah. JazakAllah khair.

The Challenge of Our Phones

Additionally brothers, when we're talking about challenges — personal challenges that we have — we know one of the biggest issues for all of us is our phones. Either over usage of it or misuse of it. Including those of our children.

Earlier this week I got a phone call from my mother who was perplexed, frightened. She said, "Every night I collect the phones from my kids. And I went to go collect my 21-year-old's phone and he looked at me and said, 'I'm going to kill you.'" And she's so frightened she called me and said, "What am I supposed to do?" This is a local youngster, subhanAllah.

Interestingly, she sent me a picture of her son. I've seen him in the masjid so many times, in different masajid. Parents are suffering at the hands of kids who are completely addicted like a drug. If you take a drug from someone — even your son, if he's a drug addict — and you take it away, guess what he's going to say? So phones have become a very big, serious problem. And not only for our youngsters, but husbands and wives. And this is leading to a lot of problems with their marriages.

Two Solutions

1. Salam Guard

So I want to share with you two things. One is alhamdulillah we have a free program that we created through an initiative at Darussalam. It's called Salam Guard — S-A-L-A-M Guard. SalamGuard.com. It's a free program. You can visit the website.

Alhamdulillah, this has got a bunch of resources:

How to lock down your phone, be it an Android or be it an iPhone. How to be able to protect those devices from accessing filth and haram websites and so forth — with just a click of a button. And number two, how to control the usage of it too — how much time we're using it. And number three, we've given some practical adhkar and Quranic verses to recite, and have others recite, who might be suffering a genuine addiction.

So we're going to keep on adding great assets there through Salam Guard. But at the moment, please take a look at it. Have your children look at it as well. And benefit from it by installing it and just really locking down our phones insha'Allah — so that throughout the rest of our lives, alhamdulillah, we are not misusing our phones or overusing them.

2. Annual Detox No Tech Retreat

And second is that masha'Allah we have our annual Detox No Tech Retreat. It starts tomorrow night. It's for 24 hours. We do it every year. So it happens to coincide this weekend masha'Allah. Saturday Maghrib to Sunday Maghrib. It's for the entire family — guys, girls, mom, dad, youth.

So please consider joining. I know you have some great programs happening here as well. So before or after, whatever it is — the program starts at Maghrib on Saturday at Masjid Darussalam, and it ends at Sunday Maghrib. The schedule can be seen on our website.

And it's not just that you leave your phones and come to the masjid — it's actually that all the talks are related to preparing for death and making the most of the lives that we have. So insha'Allah this would be a great way to welcome the blessed month of Ramadan, and hopefully work on cutting out these addictions that a lot of us are suffering from.

May Allah make all these programs we're having in this masjid and all of our other masajid successful and beneficial. Jazakumullahu khairan. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.