Ramadan 2025 | The Power of Prophetic Prayers | Mufti Azeemuddin Ahmed | 03/13

Respected friends, dear listeners, brothers and sisters, As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh. Alhamdulillah, Allah blessed us with speaking on a verse yesterday from Surah Al-Imran where Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala — we talked about the two different types of verses in the Qur'an. Those that are unambiguous and those that are ambiguous.

And we spent time speaking about how those verses that are ambiguous are meant as a test. And that there are certain individuals who instead of focusing on what is clear and what is easy to practice, they focus on those things that are ambiguous. And the purpose of it is not to get to the bottom of the so-called truth, but rather the purpose is just to have fun, to find confusion.

And just like Samiri did to Musa alayhis salam's nation. When Musa alayhis salam went to receive the Torah, he went and played around with the minds of the people by creating that golden calf — and that whole story is going to be recited tonight inshallah in Surah Taha. He took advantage of the people being naive, and he used tricks that he had under his sleeve, and he deceived thousands and thousands of people.

So he was punished for that. Musa alayhis salam said, why did you do this? When someone does something wrong, you say, why did you do it? So then Samiri gave an answer — which you hear everywhere today.

When you ask someone, hey, why did you do something crazy? Why did you break that window? Why did you slash someone's tire? What do people say? Usually, "I don't know." Why did you give a bad answer to your mom? Why did you say something so obnoxious to your dad? Why did you do this to your sibling? "I don't know." Everything — "I don't know." Any crazy thing today, the craziest things — "I don't know." Or, "I just felt like it."

Well, this is an old answer in the Qur'an. Samiri gives it to Musa alayhis salam. Why did you cause so much corruption? One third of the nation — subhanAllah — became mushrik. What did you do this for? He took the sand from under Jibril alayhis salam's horse's foot and put it in — all this stuff. Why? At the end of it all, why? And he said:

"My nafs told me to do it." So this is how dangerous things can become. When your nafs tells you to do things, there's no end to what type of crazy stuff a person can do.

The Danger of the Nafs

I was just reading — I saw an interview of a person who went back to the Saydnaya prison in Syria after coming out. It was mind-boggling. In broad daylight, he's going through the different cells, and he shows a place where he stayed on the floor for 18–20 months. He went and showed a place where him and his two friends wrote "brothers for life" together and their names on the wall. Both of them were executed; he's the only one who came out alive.

And then he showed different rooms where they used different methods of execution. One room used a chainsaw to kill people. Another room used chemical poisons. Another room was something else. Then he said, one day they dragged me and beat me so badly — I have no idea — I woke up many, many hours later, could not walk for one month. And my roommates told me they saw that they had lashed me 220 times.

And we should read about this — what's going on? What makes a person so evil like this? And most of these people are just average innocent people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was in the news about a 14-year-old who saw that toxic chemical waste being deposited was causing cancer and so many other diseases to local Syrians. So at the young age of 14, he came up with a cheaper method that Syria could afford that would dispose of these things without causing harm to the local people. He did the equivalent of getting a patent, and he was supposed to be called to the presidential palace and recognized and awarded for his extreme level of intelligence and what he did for the country.

So he had all the papers for the nuclear power plants and the waste disposal in his backpack. He was on the road going somewhere. They stopped him. They found that paperwork and they arrested him. 14 years old. "Why do you have this?" "I'm supposed to be invited to the presidential palace to do a presentation." Who's going to listen? And then they gave him a stern warning — next time, I'm going to kill you. So alhamdulillah, he came over here, graduated from Stanford with a master's, and now he went back to Syria trying to help build a country. A young man. Some positive story there too.

But if you ask these prison wardens, why did you do it? They'll tell you the same answer — كَذَٰلِكَ سَوَّلَتْ لِي نَفْسِي — "I just felt like it." Did anyone tell you to do this specific thing in this specific way? Even the guy on the top who gave the order — but why like this? That's how dangerous the nafs is. There's no end to it.

That same nafs comes and says, let's try to cause fitna and fasad wherever we go. Try to mess around with the verses, try to misrepresent verses of the Qur'an and so forth. That was alhamdulillah the discussion from yesterday.

Those Firmly Grounded in Knowledge

So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala then said:

And those who have deep knowledge, they simply say, "We believe in it." We don't need to know the depth of every single thing — we believe in it. Everything is for the sake of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. There are many things that we simply don't understand.

When we talk about having the iman equivalent to the iman of the awa'iz Nisabur — the old women of Nisabur. In the books of Kalam and Aqidah, they sometimes say, آمِنُوا كَإِيمَانِ عَجَائِزِ نَيْسَابُور — "Believe like the old women of Nisabur." So that story is — shaitan can come, we talked about shaitan and Abu Huraira r.a. and the Ayatul Kursi story. Shaitan can come definitely in the form of a person.

So shaitan came in the form of some person and went to some uneducated villagers. He said, "Come here, I have a question for you, can you help me out?" He said, "Yes, what's your question?" He said, "Allah is capable of doing everything, right?" And honestly these shayateen are walking around right here. At your Dawah iftar parties tonight, you're gonna find some of these shayateen there. At these late-night dinners — because I've seen it. They're sitting at an iftar party, at a waleema, causing fitna. They are preying on average uneducated Muslims.

He said, "Allah is able to do everything, right?" And the guy is like, "Yeah, of course." So then he pulls out a needle and brings out an egg. He says, "Allah is able to take this egg and put it through the hole of this needle? What do you think?" The man says, "I never thought about that. That's an interesting question." So the man said, "Okay, I don't know the answer, I'm confused — that's why I'm asking." Okay, salam, moved on.

Met the next guy, asked him the same question. "Do you believe in Allah?" "Of course." "Allah is able to do everything?" "Yes." "Can Allah put this egg through the hole of the needle?" The guy says, "Man, that is such an enlightening, forward-thinking, progressive question. You're so educated. You're so enlightened. Man, I never thought about something like that. I have no idea." And so on — putting seeds of doubt everywhere.

Eventually he comes across an old lady — nanijan, dadijan, old auntie. "I have a question." She said, "Beta, what's your question?" "Allah is able to do everything?" "Of course, beta, Allah is able to do everything." He says, "Can Allah put an egg through the hole of a needle?" Right then and there she took her chappal and started beating this guy on top of his head. And she said, "Khabeeth, la'een, get out from here!" She didn't probably think it was a shaitan, but she called him a shaitan. "How dare you ask such a crazy question like this. Go from here."

So they say, look — this was the old lady of Nisabur. She didn't have a logical rebuttal for this. But deep down in her heart, she knew that this is you playing games. I'm not interested in playing games. Don't you bring these games when it comes to speaking about Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. That level of iman is necessary for everyone. Especially now.

The Democratization of Knowledge and Its Dangers

Because we're living in a very so-called progressive era where everyone is well-read, everyone has access to YouTube. The Bukhari Dars, Tirmidhi Dars, the Fiqh questions that happened behind closed doors — not because we want to keep everyone in the dark, but because these topics are very complex, and you have to have 15 years of experience to get to that discussion. Now those discussions are happening where? On late-night podcast shows. And those are the ones that get the most views. The most controversial, the most difficult, the most challenging, the most irrelevant-to-average-man's-life discussions — they get the most hits.

So now every single person who doesn't even know the fard of ghusl will know some deep concepts about the Qur'an being infallible or not, and rasmul khat — whether the Qur'an, how is it written, when was it preserved, all kinds of things. As one person called it, the "democratization of knowledge" — everyone should have access to everything, information age. Which is not right.

You should have access according to your age and level. Imagine you're telling a three-year-old how he came into this world. Is that a good idea? No — there's no democratization of knowledge for a child. Some types of knowledge will destroy him. Similarly, when it comes to the matters of deen, you have to build your way up.

And this is a very big problem we have right now — people giving talks, khutbahs, lectures on things that should never be discussed in front of the general public. And all it does is create more doubt and more issues in the minds of people.

Yesterday I had a very nice conversation with a brother who is running for some office somewhere. Alhamdulillah, a very sincere brother — may Allah grant him success. One of the things he spoke about was imams, ulama, muftis and some issues he had. Nothing serious. At the end I said, "Listen, let me give you my two cents. The work you're trying to do is amazing. And we're fragmented, we're not united. And you're only making your own issue even worse." I said, "From the general public — how many people that you speak to, in the average stores, in the average iftar parties, in the coffee shops — how many people have the phone number of a scholar saved in their phone?" He said, "Probably very few." How many of them actually go in to speak to a scholar about their specific issues? Very few.

So the majority of people have no connection with ulama of any sort, any background, any madhab. Now you come in and you had one bad experience, and the way he lumped together what he meant by "scholar" was A to Z — all sorts of people that I would not even regard as a scholar. But he put them all together. And I said, what you're doing is a huge disservice to yourself and also to the person in front of you. Because he doesn't know much about ulama at all. He never met one, he never has a phone number.

One of our students said, "Before I met you, I thought 'maulana' means anyone who speaks in a language that we don't understand." Probably a college grad — he tells me this. He said, "Before I met you I thought maulana is anyone who speaks a foreign language." SubhanAllah. A local kid, a local young man.

So imagine this already big distance that we have between imams, ulama and the general community. And then you take shots at them. What are you doing? If that person's son or daughter is becoming LGBTQ, or one child left Islam, or one of them ran away from home — he wants to go to the imam for help. Now he remembers what you just said. And now he's not going to want to go because he doesn't trust anyone. Look at how much harm has been caused. Alhamdulillah, he understood.

Building Iman on Logical Foundations

So what we're speaking about is the idea that a person needs to be careful — when, where, and what we say things. We don't know the ramifications. And so in this day and age, when people's iman is weak and they're too well-read for their own spiritual safety — curiosity-killed-the-cat type of knowledge — we need to give them logical proofs of the Qur'an being the book of Allah. Logical proofs of the existence of Allah. Logical proofs of the Prophet ﷺ being a prophet of Allah. We have to build our way up to get to the Qur'an and Sunnah.

Someone in the lobby asked me two days ago — before I started speaking. Christians are born into Christianity, Jews are born into that religion. We're born here as Muslims. What's the proof? We say we're on the haqq. Well, they say they're on the haqq too. What's the difference? He was genuine — a good Muslim, a hafiz al-Qur'an, a practicing person who comes here regularly. But he was asking — perhaps for someone else, perhaps for himself.

I said, the difference is not that we're on the right path because we claim so. That's not going to hold up anywhere. We say we're on the right path because we not only believe so, but we actually have the proof to back it up. He said, "How do you have the proof?" I said, it starts off — if I just say, "It's Qur'an and Sunnah," well, why should anyone believe Qur'an and Sunnah? I believe in it, but the person in front of me — for him, what is Qur'an and Sunnah? How do we even arrive at Qur'an and Sunnah? And you arrived at Qur'an and Sunnah through what? Through logical proofs.

That's why studying ilmul kalam nowadays is very important. In the past, they said it's bid'ah, not necessary. But we're in a different era now. In this day and age, if a person does not study the logical proofs of these things, you're going to be in really bad shape. Our children will be very confused. Because they'll say, "I'm Muslim and I fast because my mom and dad said so." That doesn't hold beyond 4th or 5th grade. After that, the person will say, well, everyone else celebrates Easter. My mom and dad do it, so? Why are we doing this? Who's on the haqq? All of us? None of us?

That's the situation we're speaking about. Gaining strong knowledge of deen — number one, based on logical proofs. Then after that you go on to the wahi. And then after you go through all the logical proofs and all the wahi, at the end you still have to go back to iman bil ghayb — belief in the unseen.

Because when you go through logical proofs — what is ilmul kalam? I call this mental martial arts. Imagine you and I fight karate or judo, and a kafir beats a Muslim. Does that mean Islam is no longer the true religion? Of course not. It means the kafir was more well-versed in that specific martial art, or had more physical strength. So ilmul kalam is mental martial arts. You're using logic to deconstruct the opponent's proofs, and to build strong proofs that lead up to Qur'an and Sunnah and the existence of Allah.

But it can happen that the person in front of you is more well-versed in the logical sciences than you are, and he may be able to take you down. So if you're pushed into a corner, we cannot say, "Oh, I guess Islam is not true." No. It means I have to go back and get better — sharpen my knife, spend more time in my mental gym, study more kalam, get stronger. So gaining those logical proofs is important, gaining the proof from Qur'an and Sunnah is important, and then topping it off with iman bil ghayb. These are my proofs — 20, 50 logical proofs, 20, 50 proofs from Qur'an and Sunnah. But at the end, I believe in Allah not because of these proofs. I believe in Allah because Allah is Haqq. Full stop. All these proofs led me to the top. But I'm no longer dependent on them because the person in front can break those logical proofs. That's the journey we have to go through.

I was traveling recently and someone said, "Is nathr possible?" I said, yes, it's possible. And another person said, "Brother, I'm a student of science — but this stuff really shakes my faith." There's no reason the concept of ayn and sihr should shake your faith. You just haven't studied it properly. If you study it properly, you'll understand how logical and sensible all these things are. Perspective has to be correct.

So dear parents who are listening to me — these conversations have to happen at your home. You might not be the best person to have this conversation yourself. But that's where you have institutions like ours, where you come and you have ulama — mashallah, tens of them here — who can address these issues and make sure our sons and daughters, before they leave junior high school, before they get into high school, are in a good, solid, strong state of iman. And then there's no guarantee we'll be in that state all the time. The attacks of shaitan may come anytime, and the nafs anytime.

The Du'a of Surah Al-Imran: Steadfastness of the Heart

Hence this verse of Surah Al-Imran, which I want to get to now. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, after saying what the people who want to cause fitna do, says that those who have solid ilm say:

"We believe in this" — all the ambiguous and clear verses of the Qur'an, all of them are from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala — "and only the most intelligent people will take heed." Then Allah says the du'a:

Let's go through this du'a now. "O Allah, do not allow our hearts to become crooked." What does زَاغَ mean? زَاغَةُ الشَّمْسِ is when the sun moves away, slides away, sets down — that's called زَاغَة. So زَيْغ is when the heart turns away from the right path. Allah says in another verse of the Qur'an:

When they chose to become crooked themselves, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala then made their hearts crooked. Don't blame Allah for your problems. Allah says, the ball is in your court — you decided to act crooked with Me, then I give you a taste of your own medicine. That's so scary. Because there are people who object to the deen, object to ulama, make fun of things. And what goes around comes around.

We were traveling many years ago — I was with my father — and we went to one masjid. There was one uncle sitting there, just a big mess, crying, upset. Sitting there from one salah to the other, just sitting there. So our host said, "You see this person? Make du'a for him." We asked what happened to him. He said, this person previously had a very active life, was very successful, but he had a very sharp, nasty tongue. Tablighi Jamaat brothers would come to the masjid, doing their work, and this man couldn't leave them alone. He would go and say, "Oh, you're in jamaat here? Do you know where your wife is? Maybe she's with someone else. Do you know where your kids are? Maybe they're out doing haram while you're out here." He would literally make fun of each of the jamaat brothers like this.

The Prophet ﷺ said:

Whoever believes in Allah and the Day of Judgment should say something good or keep quiet. This person did not know how to keep quiet.

Allah says:

When you plot against your brother, when you plot against anyone else, what happens? The plot — you actually fall into the very hole you dug for someone else. And that's exactly what happened. His wife ran away, his kids ran away. They gave him such great pain in this life that he literally just running there in the masjid, from one salah to the other, sitting there in a disheveled shape, just sitting there crying.

What do we learn from here? That Allah doesn't do this to people. They do this to themselves. What a powerful ayah:

Allah never oppresses anyone. It is they who oppress themselves.

So this is the ayah — فَلَمَّا زَاغُوا أَزَاغَ اللَّهُ قُلُوبَهُمْ — when you became crooked, Allah says, I made your hearts crooked. So now we learn from this du'a here that we're saying: Ya Allah, Rabbana — You are our Rabb, our most powerful, most loving, caring, nourishing Lord — we are asking You: do not allow our hearts, after You have given us guidance, after You have blessed us with iman, after You have given us all sorts of beautiful gifts like ma'rifah of Allah — O Allah, please do not make us amongst those who get lost, and then go after the ambiguous things of the deen.

When you start attacking everyone, what did the Prophet ﷺ say?

(Sahih Muslim, Hadith 2623)

Whoever says, "Everyone is destroyed" — did you all hear anyone speak like this? "Man, everyone is messed up, the whole ummah is going to hell." What is this? The Prophet ﷺ said, he is the one who has destroyed them. The one who says everyone is destroyed, there is no hope, everything is falling apart — one thing is you're talking about a problem and providing a solution. If you are not providing a solution and you're just sitting there whining, the Prophet ﷺ says, you are the one who destroyed them.

And another reading of this is أَهْلَكُهُمْ as ism tafdhil — he is the most destroyed of them. This negativity we should not have. So when this negativity comes in, you are again plotting your own destruction.

The Heart Can Turn at Any Moment

What do we learn from this? That it is possible for a person to be guided on the right path, and then to be misguided. This is the scary part we learn from this du'a. It is possible for someone to be on the right path — maybe even almost to the last minutes of his life, the last days of his life — and to be misguided. This was such an important issue that the Prophet ﷺ, one of the most narrated and most quoted du'as he made was:

O the Turner of the Hearts, keep my heart firm upon Your deen. The word قَلْب in Arabic means the heart. And قَلَبَ, انْقَلَبَ, تَقَلَّبَ — all of these words mean to turn. You know the du'a of safar: وَإِنَّا إِلَىٰ رَبِّنَا لَمُنقَلِبُونَ — "Ya Allah, we are turning back home." Inqilab — revolution — everything turns upside down.

So anyway, why is قَلْب called قَلْب? They say:

The heart has been called qalb because it changes so quickly. Angry one moment, happy the next. Sad one moment, excited the next. So iman and kufr, they can come and go super, super quickly. That's why it's called قَلْب.

So Rasulullah ﷺ's du'a is يَا مُقَلِّبَ الْقُلُوبِ ثَبِّتْ قَلْبِي عَلَىٰ دِينِكَ — O the Turner of the Hearts, keep my heart firm on Your deen. This is the du'a that the Prophet ﷺ used to make very often. Another similar du'a:

O Allah, Musarrif al-qulub — O the Changer of the Hearts — turn the direction of our hearts towards Your obedience. صَرْف in Arabic — المصرف — is where the verb forms keep changing. So مُصَرِّفَ الْقُلُوبِ — O the Changer of the Hearts — صَرِّفْ قُلُوبَنَا عَلَىٰ طَاعَتِكَ — change the direction of our hearts towards Your obedience.

Once, one of the wives of the Prophet ﷺ said, "Ya Rasulullah, why do I hear you making this du'a so often — رَبَّنَا لَا تُزِغْ قُلُوبَنَا — why do I hear you making this du'a so often?" So the Prophet ﷺ responded by saying:

(Sahih Muslim, Hadith 2654)

Indeed the hearts of the children of Adam are between the fingers of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. He may turn them in any direction that He wishes. It's very scary.

So one second we're sitting here in Laylatul Qadr crying in the front row, and within six hours, you could say, "I'm not sure about Islam." It is very, very, very possible. How quickly does it take for iman to leave? Quicker than it takes to turn off your lights in the room. What's the time between pressing the off button and the lights going off? Quicker than that, iman leaves. It's literally here and then gone. In and out. And it can happen anytime. It might even happen to you within the month of Ramadan. It might happen to you in the most precious moments of this month.

And if it happens, immediately we have to hit the emergency button:

Run, do fresh wudu. Pray two raka'at salah. You say, "I don't feel like praying." Okay, put your head in sujood and start crying. And say, "Allah, please get me out of this mess. I'm slipping, falling, and I don't know how to get out of this. There's no one who can help me besides You."

So this is the background of where this story was mentioned — that the Prophet ﷺ would mention this du'a most often. And when asked why, he said, because I'm worried. Allah, He controls our hearts. He can turn them in any direction He wishes.

وَهَبْ لَنَا مِن لَّدُنكَ رَحْمَةً — O Allah, please grant us from Your end mercy. Meaning, I cannot demand from You to keep me Muslim. And I cannot demand from You to give me iman. I'm only requesting You, out of Your sheer mercy, that You allow me to enjoy the blessing of iman till my last breath.

رَحْمَةً — the tanwin there gives the meaning of ta'zeem, greatness. This is a great rahmah that includes all sorts of things. And then on top of that, مِن لَّدُنكَ — from Your end. Ya Allah, You create the means of this mercy.

إِنَّكَ أَنتَ الْوَهَّابُ — Indeed, You are the One who is the best of those who give gifts. So whatever iman you and I have, it's not because we're born Muslim or come from a Muslim country. We are Muslim because Allah chose to give us a gift. We are the recipients of the gift of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.

Prophetic Du'as for Steadfastness in Iman

Now I would like to share some du'as of the Prophet ﷺ that are on the same topic. Not only do we have an ayah of the Qur'an, but now we also have du'as of the Prophet ﷺ on the same theme of steadfastness. There are too many of them, I can't go through all of them. You can search online. I'm going to give you a few of them. The majority of these du'as, if not all of them, will be found in Hizb al-A'zam and Munajat Maqbul — Accepted Whispers as well as The Great Litany — both are found in the Islam bookstore, and they will have all these du'as.

O Allah, I ask You for steadfastness in my affairs. O Allah, allow me to be highly guided in every single affair of mine. Ability to be grateful for Your blessings. To be able to worship You properly. I ask You for a heart that is pure and clean and free from any taints of kufr and shirk. I ask You for the best of those things that You know. And I seek refuge in You from the evil of that which You know. And I seek forgiveness from You for that which You know about me.

Look at these beautiful three things at the end: I ask You for the best of every good that You know of — of course Allah knows all the good in the world. I seek refuge in You from the evil of everything You know. And number three, I seek forgiveness from You for that which You know about me.

The majority of these du'as are much longer. I want to just choose one short one, and then we'll end with that.

O Allah, I ask You for iman that will not turn back to apostasy — iman that will not turn back and leave me. And I ask You for such luxury and enjoyment that will never come to an end. In this dunya, is that possible? It is possible to have blessings until your death. But after death, even that will end. So the true acceptance of this du'a will be in the akhirah. We're asking Allah in the dunya as well, but the real place where it will never end is the akhirah. And oh Allah, I ask You for the companionship of our Nabi Muhammad ﷺ in the highest levels of eternal Jannah.

Three things: Iman that never goes away. Blessings and luxury that never come to an end. And being in the company of the Prophet ﷺ in the highest levels of Jannah. This is another beautiful du'a asking Allah for ثَبَات.

There's another one:

Oh Allah, I seek refuge in You from having doubts in the truth after having been given certainty and yaqeen — after having been given guidance. This is the du'a that we should make every single day, every single salah: Ya Allah, please keep me on the state of iman.

Iman Can Leave in an Instant

I remember some years ago, there was a student — I clearly remember — and he used to come for Fajr from nearby, walking distance. He used to come with his friend. At that time Fajr was super early, 3:30–3:45. So after Ramadan, I didn't see him. This boy used to come for maktab as well, here in this place. He comes from a very noble Muslim country and a very noble Muslim city.

One day the friend — I asked him, "Hey, where is the friend who used to come? I don't see him anymore." And he so nonchalantly told me, "Oh, he's no longer a Muslim." He said he couldn't take the pressure in school — people constantly asking, "Oh, you're Muslim, you're from this country?" He said, "Forget it, man. I'm not a Muslim anymore. I can't take this anymore." Within a few weeks of a person being here for Fajr salah — walking for Fajr salah — a person leaves the fold of Islam. May Allah guide him wherever he is, and all those others who have left the deen. It is something we should not take lightly. It can happen to us, and it can happen to anyone else.

Last night, a brother told me — he comes from a small town, two hours away from here. He said, whenever he goes to his small town and to his masjid, he cried the last time. He's in his mid-to-late 30s. He said, every single person he grew up with — went to school and college with — every Muslim is either outright, completely non-Muslim belief-wise, or 100% lives their life like a non-Muslim. Allah knows best what's in their hearts. But their actions are 100%. In the month of Ramadan — drinking, and haram, and zina, and everything else. Never come for jamaat, never come for anything. He said, "Not a single childhood friend of mine is left in that entire community. Everyone I know has left the deen."

This is not an anomaly. This is the norm. What you see here — in the masjid — is an anomaly. Everything you see in Dar es Salaam, everything you see in any masjid is an anomaly. The majority have left or are leaving. I'm serious. If you're going to look at the stats, that's what it is. The ummah is in really dire need of people reaching out, especially in the month of Ramadan.

Reaching Out to Those Disconnected from the Deen

Do not take it for granted. This past Sunday after Dhuhr, I was speaking and I said, "Listen, we have these packets for non-Muslim neighbors that we're giving out here. We also have packets for our Muslim corporate colleagues, Muslim business contacts, Muslim contractors that you work with." Many of them have no idea Ramadan has even begun — I promise you. No idea. They live in a completely parallel universe. Maybe their mom will call them from somewhere — "Beta, did you go for Jummah?" On Jumu'atul Wida'. And they'll say, "Oh man, I missed the whole month." That's what it is.

So we have to understand what we're dealing with. We're dealing with tons of people who are just completely disconnected from the deen. Please take that Ramadan timetable, take some dates, take something else you made from home, whatever it is, and give it to those who are eating in Ramadan at work. Who are continuing to womanize in the month of Ramadan. Who are continuing to act as though they don't care about Islam. Say Ramadan Mubarak and give it to them. That's the least we can do. At least make them realize that we still see some flicker of iman in them.

Because no one else knows that he's a believer, and he's made himself think that he's not a believer. So by us making him realize that — "No, of course you're a Muslim" — this is possibly one of the best things we can do for him. We're not asking him to come for taraweeh. We're not asking for anything. We're just saying, we recognize the iman in you. Please keep it up. And inshallah, maybe Jumu'atul Wida' he'll show up. Maybe Khatmul Qur'an he'll show up. Maybe Eid he'll show up. And that might be a game changer for him.

Closing Du'a

I ask Allah to save our iman. I ask Allah to save the iman of our children. I ask Allah to save the iman of our progeny. I ask Allah that all those who are on the verge of losing their iman or have lost it — may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bring iman back into their hearts. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala allow us to use all the means required for the protection of our iman. And may Allah keep us far away from any and all means that will lead us and our progeny to losing iman. Ameen.

Oh Allah, we ask You to accept this 13th fast of ours. Oh Allah, we ask You to accept our qiyam. We ask You to accept our sadaqah. We ask You to accept any and all works of khair that we have done. Ya Allah, we ask You to grant us qabuliyya and acceptance, even though our actions are filled with flaws and are not worthy of acceptance.

Oh Allah, we ask You to grant us unbelievable, unshakable iman. Oh Allah, allow us to have yaqeen and iman that is unshakable, and allow it to be based — Ya Allah — in that which You want it to be based in. Oh Allah, grant us the ability to have the proper means of expressing and showing the people the beauty of iman.

Oh Allah, we ask You — Ya Allah — to grant our parents and our elders long life and health. And oh Allah, our teachers and our parents and grandparents, those who have passed away — Ya Allah, fill their graves with nur and become pleased with them.

Oh Allah, we ask You to grant us all the ability to make — Ya Allah — such du'as that are accepted in Your court, and allow us to use the medium of du'a to communicate with You and to build our relationship with You, Ya Allah.

Oh Allah, we ask You — Ya Allah — those who have any type of spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological, or familial needs who are sitting here listening, or listening online or from anywhere else — Ya Allah, in these mubarak last few seconds before we break our fast, we ask You — Ya Allah — to fulfill everyone's needs, Ya Allah, to fulfill everyone's needs, and grant everyone an accepted fast and everyone an accepted qiyamul layl.

Oh Allah, we ask You to allow our final 10 days of this month to be spent in the most powerful, most amazing, most beautiful manner. Oh Allah, inspire our adults, young adults, and youth to make i'tikaf. Oh Allah, we ask You — Ya Allah — inspire our youngsters, Ya Allah, to make i'tikaf wherever they are. Oh Allah, we ask You — those who are making i'tikaf — allow them to find Laylatul Qadr, allow them to find Laylatul Qadr, and allow their du'as to be accepted.