Friday Khutbahs (Sermons) · 07. June 2024
I begin in the name of God, the kind, the compassionate, the loving, the caring. The ultimate Creator, the singular Creator, the only Creator, the One who is indivisible. The Singular. The Singular Unity, the One. The One who has created many, the One who is the originator of multiplicity. The One who, by His hand, this creation turns. The One who, by His hand, the day rolls into night and the night rolls into day. By His hand, the summer rolls into the fall and the fall rolls into the winter,...
Friday Khutbahs (Sermons) · 24. May 2024
We are still, after eight months, stuck in a nightmare that will not cease and that we cannot wake up from. Somehow, it has become acceptable and legitimate in the eyes of most of the world that the people who suffered the Holocaust of six million dead—or at least the state of Israel that claims to represent those people, because I do not buy into the myth that the state of Israel represents all Jews in the world—can exterminate some two million people. It is as if the tragedy is somehow...
Friday Khutbahs (Sermons) · 17. May 2024
If rain falls on fertile land, then gorgeous things will grow. If rain falls on putrid land, nothing will grow and you will be left with ugliness and swamps, or nothing at all. If you are like me, who washes their shoes and then leaves them out to dry but forgets them and rain falls, then you will wake up and find that they are very wet, which is what I woke up to today and what I am thinking about. I laugh to myself because the parable of the rain is what I had been preparing yesterday. The...
Usuli Weekly Newsletter · 17. May 2024
Greetings of Peace (al salamu ‘alaykum) dear Friends, I pray you are managing as well as can be expected in these challenging times. I know it is incredibly hard as we continue to see so many heartbreaking images on social media and read the news headlines about the state of the world. At the same time, I am so inspired and encouraged by the many acts of bravery among our students and fellow humanists who so bravely stand up against injustice. Here, we have been working hard every week to...
Friday Khutbahs (Sermons) · 10. May 2024
I want to begin this first sermon by offering congratulations to this year's graduates. There are many graduates in my personal life that I am very proud of, and I am very proud of the work that they have put in. It is no small achievement to graduate school, whether it be from high school, undergraduate, or graduate school, although I do want to add that education and learning does not begin nor stop in our educational institutions. Our educational institutions are deeply flawed. Nonetheless,...
Usuli Weekly Newsletter · 08. May 2024
Greetings of Peace (al salamu ‘alaykum) dear Friends, I pray you are managing well in these dark times. I am going to keep it short this week and only encourage everyone to watch the Shaykh’s khutbah from this past week entitled, “Protest or Perish: Lessons from The Ant Colony,” which is a brilliant demonstration of the importance of knowledge and scholarship in the darkest of times, when you think there is nothing left to say about our kids and students getting brutalized and arrested...
Friday Khutbahs (Sermons) · 03. May 2024
The pervasive issue all around us, overwhelming our senses, is the student protests that are taking place all over the country and the suppression of these protests by brute force. Universities all over the country are declaring the protesters to be “trespassers” and calling in the police to forcibly remove these so-called “trespassers.” There is much to say and reflect on. Some points are rather obvious, others are not so obvious. But let us start with the most straightforward issue of...
Usuli Weekly Newsletter · 28. April 2024
Greetings of Peace (al salamu ‘alaykum) dear Friends, I pray you are managing as well as can be expected given the state of the world, especially this week as our youth are being attacked, vilified, and arrested for protesting and building encampments on university campuses across the country in solidarity with Palestine. It is a dark, dark time for humanity and the videos that are circulating on social media with students, faculty, and many others being man-handled and dehumanized by the...
Friday Khutbahs (Sermons) · 26. April 2024
I want to start today with a story. Usually, giving khutbahs is scary both internally and externally. Any kind of public speaking is scary. You are scared of how you are going to look, you want to sound smart. You prepare, but with what I want to talk about, I do not think that there is any adequate way for me to prepare, because I need to tell a story. This past week, I got very bad poison ivy all over my body. Somewhere around 50-70%, it was serious. A friend of mine and I were cutting trees...
Friday Khutbahs (Sermons) · 19. April 2024
History is a deliberate and most sagacious teacher. It is no accident that throughout the Qur'an, time and time again, God calls upon us to reflect upon history, to study the past nations before us, and to reflect upon the patterns of human complexity. God calls upon us to study what makes people come together and what makes people follow a certain path and not another. God calls upon us to follow the pulse of sociological dynamics and the very record of human conduct. It is not simple jargon...