Summary: As-salamu ‘alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. (Arabic).<br> <br> So I realize that it’s Friday and it’s 4:30 or so, which means you are extremely sleepy. We have already, you know, ‘survived’ a khutbah this afternoon and, you know, now there are 3 speakers that are going to come before you, so I understand the challenge that I have and, actually more so, that you have because I can stay awake because I am talking but you have to stay awake by listening, which is a lot harder. But what I want to share is not very complicated, inshaAllah wa Ta’ala, and I don’t think it will take even the whole 20 minutes. It’s really a heart-to-heart that I want to have with all of you and something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks personally in my life and the life of my family and my children, and that is that the very fundamental premise on which all of our faith is based, the fitrah, which is the subject matter of this session, is under attack, and that we are building an artificial picture of Islam, personally for ourselves and our communities oftentimes, that is really very hollow at its core, and this is a very dangerous trend. An ayah that really makes me shiver when I think about the way Allah expresses this problem, “A’udhu Billahi min ash-shaytaan-ir-rajeem (etc., in Arabic).” The Prophet (saw) is warned about a dangerous group of people within the ranks of those who call themselves Muslim and the big crime that Allah describes they have is that they say they believe with their mouths, but their hearts haven’t come to believe; their hearts have not yet experienced something called faith. This problem is a very serious one, and I want to start in this conversation with something very, very basic: The fitrah is not something that is sound after you become Muslim. All human beings enjoy this predisposed sense of decency that Allah (A’zza Wa Jal) put and preprogrammed in all of us, a sense of commitment to truth, to fairness, to mercy, to courtesy, to respect for others, you know, of gratitude, of appreciation, of having regard. These are things that aren’t just some things Muslims are concerned with; these are things that humanity was gifted with. And these are things that the Prophet (saw) excelled in even before the revelation starting coming to him. He was already at the height of his fitrah. And actually we would consider, at least in my limited understanding of the seerah of the Prophet (saw), in the life of our Messenger (‘alayhi’l-salat wa’l-salam) that that predisposed decency that the Prophet lived up to (‘alayhi’l-salat wa’l-salam) even before revelation came, gave him his credibility to carry the message of Islam. Not anybody can just carry any message and it will have weight. People can give good speeches and people can talk, but when their character is not there to back up what they’re saying and people know them personally and say, “Well, you may be impressed with his or her speech because you know him only from YouTube or you know her only from that public forum, but I know them personally and I don’t want to hear anything they have to say, because I know what they’re like in their personal life.” Which means there is something hollow. That wasn’t the case with our Prophet (saw). There is a very deep introspection that all of us need and, actually, people that are up on this podium and the people that are sitting in the audience, none of us are the exception to this introspection; we all really carefully have to look deep inside and see what kind of people we have become. I want to get a little more specific. I want to leave generalities, inshaAllah wa Ta’ala. I’m really worried, personally, about preserving my own fitrah and the fitrah of my children. They are growing up. My oldest daughter is 10 now, and I literally, I said this in khutbah today, I talked to her just a couple of days ago and I said I miss you. And she says, baba, I’m sitting right here, why do you miss me? I was like,
