Jumu'ah Khutbah | Br. Omar Malik

Jumu'ah Khutbah | Br. Omar Malik

In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. My dear brothers and sisters in Islam, all praise and gratitude is for the sake of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. We seek his help and forgiveness from the evil of our souls and from the sins we have committed.

We ask Allah to send his peace and blessings on our beloved Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, his family, his companions, and all of his righteous followers till the Day of Judgment. And may Allah make us of those righteous followers. I bear witness that there is no one worthy of worship except for Allah and that he has no partners in his worship and that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is his final messenger and his slave. May Allah make us of his true slaves.

Reflections from Uganda: What Status Does a Poor Person Have?

Dear brothers and sisters, this is a heartfelt khutbah coming from a recent trip to Uganda, which I wanted to reflect upon with my beloved community of Valley Ranch and hopefully just share what I felt and experienced — way beyond what I thought I would be experiencing, which is sadness and looking at people in poverty. But I came back having one question in my mind, and that is the prefix of this khutbah: what status does a poor person have? A poor person — not a rich person, because everybody wants richness — but a poor person, what status does a poor person have if they are connected to Allah?

The question arose in my mind because genuinely this was not a brochure, this is not a flyer, but this was me personally looking at the faces of people for seven days straight. The people in Uganda, most of them, if you look at their geography, they live in rural areas and villages. But subhanAllah, one of the things that was very evident is the smiles on their faces, the contentment of their hearts with such little that they had. And every house that you go by — with a couple of children in front, a broken down kitchen, a home that doesn't really have much to show for, no really good access to water — but subhanAllah, all you have to do is just take your hand out of the window and you see happiness erupt in the family. You see genuine smiles, you see people coming sometimes running towards the bus just to say salams. The mothers and fathers are genuinely and respectfully showing happiness, and the children have been taught to be happy.

So the question for me was: what is it that in the West — because I've worked with enough youth and we work with communities and we know that there's anxiety, there is a lot of stress and we are always in a rat race — what makes these people so happy? It's so hard to get a smile here. We have to continue to remind people of the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ of smiling, and even remind people that one of the signs of the Day of Judgment is that you will only say salams to people that you know. So even extracting a salam out of people is sometimes so difficult unless they know you.

So what made this community so special? At the end of the trip I came back — in fact, jealous in a good way — wondering what makes these people happy and what is the status of these people in the eyes of Allah. They must be in high status with Allah because they showed us what true contentment looks like.

The Hadith After Fajr: A Glimpse of Paradise

And subhanAllah, a couple of stories really resonated with me that cannot be erased from your memory, and it is a responsibility on our shoulders to share what I felt and saw. But I want to start off with a hadith of the Prophet ﷺ, which is something that happened after Fajr. May Allah make those who attend Fajr in jama'ah consistent in Fajr and Isha, and make our prayers the highest priority in our life — and I'll explain why that is.

Dear brothers and sisters, there is a hadith narrated in a sahih narration where the Prophet ﷺ after Fajr was found doing something peculiar — something he hadn't done before — where he's reaching out to something and he's smiling as if he's trying to pluck something, and then all of a sudden he retracted his hand and put it back down. When the companions of the Prophet ﷺ saw this scene, with their adab and etiquettes, they wanted to know what exactly happened, and they wanted to respectfully learn as much as they could. So they asked the Prophet ﷺ: "O Prophet of Allah, we saw you doing something that we haven't seen you do before."

And so the Prophet ﷺ went on to explain and address the situation. He said: "I just saw Paradise, and I happened to take a glance at the grapes — the fruits of Jannah — from it." So he's visualizing, he can see — Allah has given him that ability. "And had I plucked from these fruits, you would have eaten from them for the rest of the time that we're here in this world." And then he said: "Then I was shown the Hellfire, and I retracted my hand from it."

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1052; Sahih Muslim, Hadith 2359)

Now subhanAllah, the question that I want to ask you is: if we had that kind of access, what would our behavior look like? If we knew what Jannah looks like and what's waiting for us?

The Sudanese Refugees in Uganda

But subhanAllah, when I saw the Sudanese refugees in the Ugandan refugee camps — just so you understand the situation there — subhanAllah, this is the closest I've been to actually witnessing not just poverty, but poverty with attachment to a genocide. We have seen the genocide in Gaza, and for some of us we've tried to even visit Gaza and it's very difficult. But the access to the Sudanese refugees who've suffered from a genocide and are located in Uganda is a lot easier. And so to spend time with them — there was one particular house that I can't forget.

It was a gentleman with three daughters that he was raising by himself — no idea where his wife is — because during the fleeing away from Sudan into Uganda, which was the story of thousands of people, we only got to visit a couple of families. And subhanAllah, there was a time when we were just trying to take a picture with him — our organizers and us — just to remember him and maybe share his stories, which inshallah we intend to do tonight at the Maghrib family night. But subhanAllah, this brother started speaking the Quran, and he just started staring at something, and we were trying to hold our tears. But the strength that you could see in this man's personality, and right through his eyes, is reminding me of this hadith — where he's visualizing something. He knew that Allah will take care of him, that all of this is temporary, and inshallah something much better for him is waiting for him. And he showed what patience looks like. But it was his eyes that I could not forget.

The strength — because eyes cannot lie. When you went to Uganda you see people who are suffering and you see that they're still happy. But when you go to Sudan, these people are trying to smile, but the eyes cannot lie — you can tell that they have suffered so much and they're missing their families that they've left behind, because this is not their homeland. They are from Sudan, ending up in a refugee camp. But this brother — the way he spoke about the Quran and just started mentioning verses of the Quran — and then as I stepped out, I saw an imam of the community. He had already given us a tour of his masjid. There's no bathroom and there's no water.

And ironically, alhamdulillah, we live in communities where we're hoping for our expansion to be done inshallah so we can have a bigger facility. But the two main things a masjid needs is to make wudu and to go to the bathroom, and they didn't have either of those. So people had to make tayammum and the highest priority for them was water.

Then I come home, and you go to your fridge and you get clean water, you drink it — and a lot of times, even my own children — we drink a sip and then the biggest problem in my house is who drank half of the cup, because nobody else wants to drink it now and we have to throw that water out. Or you go to gatherings where you see a water bottle, you take a sip, and then the rest of the bottle is thrown out. Had we only seen what people go through to grab a sip of clean water...

We saw a maternal health clinic — if you want to call it that — where a woman was reported to be about to give birth on a wooden bed, no mattress, on a garbage bag, and no medicine. SubhanAllah. But you come out and these people are like alhamdulillah. And our wishes and desires to attain as much wealth of this world never end, and we're still sometimes showing sadness because I had an AC problem or HVAC problem in my house and it destroys my morale for the whole day. But subhanAllah, these people are always happy.

The Imam's Favorite Verses: Signs for People Who Reflect

So anyway, I go out and we talk to the imam of that community who has already shown me his masjid. And instead of asking him about his condition — instead of making him feel like I'm the one with the upper hand — I genuinely wanted to know something else. What Allah inspired me to ask was: "What are your favorite verses of the Quran?" That was my question. I said: "Can you tell me a bit about which verses are the most beloved to you?"

And subhanAllah, this brother said: "Can I recite them to you?" And inshallah I'll try to show you that video and you'll see the power in his voice — it might not be a melodious voice, but you'll see the sincerity because he believes in these verses. And it wasn't about hardships, it wasn't about patience, but it was the ayat that we are very familiar with in Surah Aal-Imran:

"Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the day and the night are signs for people of understanding — those who remember Allah while standing, while sitting, and while lying on their sides, and give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth, and say: Our Lord, you did not create all of this aimlessly; exalted are You, so protect us from the punishment of the Hellfire."

There are signs of Allah everywhere, but we're still struggling to connect with Allah. But he remembered that Allah's signs are everywhere — even in hardship we can connect to Allah. What are these people who are connected to Allah asking for? Ease of this life? More prosperity? All of that is fine, but no — it's the real success: "O Allah, I want to go to Jannah and be protected from Hellfire." Constantly you will see the attitude of the believer: whatever it takes — even if I have to give up some wealth and some of my networking and my connections and do things that will please Allah — I'll take that loss, but I want to aim at Jannah, just like the Prophet ﷺ was visualizing.

May Allah protect us from the punishment of the Hellfire. Ameen.

Stories That Cannot Be Forgotten

I saw children in that camp running around without shoes. We brought a goodie bag — maybe it cost no more than ten dollars — but for them this was like something they've never seen. What it particularly had in it were shoes. One of the children put the shoes on and when he started walking with them he was so excited. They probably cost no more than two dollars from Walmart — he put them on and starts walking, and then he takes them off and puts them in his bag. When he realized that the shoes were getting dirty, he decided to continue walking barefoot because he didn't want to mess up his new pair of shoes. We go to the mall and spend $120 on our shoes and we're still debating whether they were nice enough. But subhanAllah, this kid puts his shoes back in his bag because he doesn't want to get them dirty.

Another kid came up to me, grabbed my hand, and said: "Can you please take me back?" — obviously he was an orphan, missing his father — "Can you please take me back from wherever you came from?" I immediately started connecting with him.

I saw an older person from Sudan. And by the way, we think of poverty and we think maybe these people are uneducated, but many of them were doctors, they had jobs, they had families that they were taking care of, and now they are living in a UNICEF tent with barely anything in it. And I asked him a question — I didn't want to be rude — so I said: "Sheikh, what do you do from Fajr to Dhuhr?" — instead of saying "what do you do all day?" And subhanAllah, the man just started crying in front of his children, which is something very hard for a man not to be able to control. And we all got emotional because he said: "Brother, I have nothing to do. I used to teach. I had a future. I don't even know where the rest of my family is." But the thing that was hurting him the most was: what does he do with his time?

And Allah has given us time here, and we still say "I am bored" — with all the opportunities we have. We're probably the only community in the world who can still speak about Gaza openly, who can still speak about the genocide in Sudan. So we have all these abilities. But you still find our youth — which I deal with sometimes — who would say: "That girl that I like at school didn't look back at me. I feel like killing myself." SubhanAllah. And then you look at these children smiling at everything. Everything was an opportunity to them.

And finally, when we inaugurated a water well — subhanAllah — the entire community was holding branches, just using that as a way to show excitement. How much money do we spend on the parties of our kids? Because we love them. But these children — whatever they could find, a branch from wherever — but the genuine happiness in their faces: I have never felt so welcomed, even with all the money and resources.

May Allah grant us that kind of contentment, and may Allah allow us to reflect upon these verses that we talked about.

أَقُولُ قَوْلِي هَذَا وَأَسْتَغْفِرُ اللهَ لِي وَلَكُمْ، إِنَّهُ هُوَ الْغَفُورُ الرَّحِيمُ

Second Khutbah: The Status of the Poor in the Eyes of Allah

Dear brothers and sisters, the question — like I had told you — that arose in my mind is: what makes these people so happy? What is it that with all the conditions that they have seen? And the biggest problem for us when we left was that our hearts are still over there. We still want to do something for them. One of the days in our trip was supposed to be just a casual safari day to go check out the rest of the beauty of the country, and unanimously every single person on the trip said: "We want to go back and spend more time with the refugees," because the spiritual impact of that was so beneficial for our souls. We were the beneficiaries — not them. And everyone wanted to cancel any other type of program just to spend more time with the refugees. And inshallah, one day we can all go together, and you'll hear more about it tonight inshallah.

And Allah says in the Quran — and today we just buried our brother Ayman, around 3:30, a youth of 21 years old from this very community. And a couple of weeks ago we lost our sister Zainab, who left behind five children — also youth that are part of our youth program. We were already trying to build a water well in her name, and alhamdulillah I had the opportunity to visit her brother in Uganda, which we started working on. And then we heard the news of brother Ayman. May Allah grant all of them the highest ranks in Jannah.

But Allah reminds us:

"And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient." And these brothers and sisters exemplified patience.

The Poor Who Are Connected to Allah

I leave you, my brothers and sisters, with a couple more thoughts about the poor — poor people who are connected to Allah — and their status in Jannah. With everything that we've heard so far, these ahadith really hit hard.

The Prophet ﷺ said: "I looked into Paradise and I saw the majority of the people were poor." Not because he's promoting poverty, but because these are the people connected to Allah. And our biggest suffering is materialism — the more we try to connect to Allah, the more the materialistic society pulls us away from Allah. But these people don't have much to be accountable for.

The Prophet ﷺ also said that the poor among the Muslims will enter Paradise before the rich by half a day — which is equivalent to 500 years. And of course we can't compare this to our days, but that's a long time — 500 years before the rich believers go into Jannah, the poor people will go into Jannah.

(Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Hadith 2353; graded Hasan Sahih)

The Prophet ﷺ also loved to hang around with the poor people. But we always want to hang around with influential people. What was the last time my goal was: "I want to spend time with a poor person and humble my soul — humble myself"? What was the last time I wanted to hang out with those people?

And that is, my brothers and sisters, what I learned — sometimes we have to break through our bubble to be able to purify our soul. And please don't take me the wrong way, but of course Umrah is one of the most beautiful trips connected to spirituality. But the spiritual impact I had from this trip was even greater. And I ask Allah to allow us all to have the opportunity to go to our own communities and spend time with the poor and needy.

Inshallah after this khutbah I'll be getting up for a few minutes — I know everyone is in a rush, but please give me five minutes of your time. We're actually going to raise funds for a really good cause that I think you will truly believe in. And everything that I try to promote with the Droplets of Mercy team is always sustainable solutions. I'll talk more about that inshallah after the khutbah.