A Speech
given by Sr Ruqaiyyah at the GCSE Certificate Presentation Ceremony for al-Noor
Islamic School,
16 students
were the ‘guinea-pigs’ for the Edexcel GCSE course, the first to enter for this
exam in
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Thanks, and
personal comments to Sr Farida Amin and Sr Noor.
Now comes the moment I’ve been dreading.
You’ve all done your hard work, laid on a
wonderful evening and programme, looked after everyone, and now it’s my turn to
get up and face the limelight.
It’s a funny thing when you are a student
at school – you probably never realise the nerves and panics your teachers are
going through. All you have to do is turn up and learn things. They have an enormous responsibility to
get things done properly in order not to let YOU down.
You may think they are geniuses who know
everything, but usually they are just ordinary men and women, just the same as
you students only a bit older. Sometimes they are only a page or two ahead of
you in the books they are teaching.
Do you know the jokes about the little boy
who doesn’t want to go to school? Mums are all familiar with this scene. He’s
got a headache, he doesn’t feel very well, the shirt he wants to wear is still
in the wash, he hasn’t done his homework, he can’t find his socks. Mum insists
that he is being silly, and he MUST go to school. Why? Because he is the
Headmaster!
When it comes to speaking to people in
public, that’s just how I feel too. I’m quite comfortable working at my desk,
where nobody can see me, and I can make mistakes and then just wipe them out.
Coming out in public is quite another matter – and this is what teachers have
to do every time they step out in front of a class.
There has been so much hard work done in
the background leading to this evening with its rewards for the achievements.
It’s not just about you students – although this IS your moment of glory, and
we are certainly not going to take that away from you.
But it is also a moment of huge pride for
your staff, and in particular Sr Farida and Sr Noor, and their helpers whose
names I do not know. Well done to you all. I am so proud of you.
I am one of the few people in this world
who knows a little about all the hours they put in, the anxieties, the
problems, the frustrations chasing around looking for solutions. Alhamdu
lillah, between us all we got there – the fields were made ready, the seeds got
planted, they didn’t get squashed or choked by weeds, and we ended up with a
bumper harvest!
Thanks be to our Lord for that!
Do you know one of the worst things that
can happen to a teacher? It is when they are so busy, so involved in what they
are doing, that they actually make the mistake of squashing somebody who needs
their help – the person who interrupts them when they are busy, and they get
pushed off impatiently. Poor old teachers – sometimes helping that student (who might be the daft one,
or the nuisance) is much more important than dealing with all the other things
they were doing. The point is – they don’t know
which is more important, the matter they are dealing with, or the simple soul
who has come to them at what seems to be the wrong moment.
Do you know this peculiar verse in the
Qur’an: ‘He frowned, and turned away,
because the blind man came to him’? Do you know what that was all about? The
man who frowned was the Prophet (pbuh). The verse refers to an occasion when
the Prophet (pbuh) himself fell into this very trap of pushing someone aside.
He was so busy talking to the important chiefs of Makkah that he was irritated
when blind Abdullah ibn Maktum interrupted him, looking for a place to sit near
him. Do you know what happened? The Prophet (pbuh) recorded that he got a nasty
headache, and shortly afterwards this revelation of Surah 80 came to him,
rebuking him. One of the things I love about our Prophet (pbuh), and the
revelation of Islam, is its brutal honesty – the Prophet (pbuh) was not spared
his mistake being noted, Allah’s rebuke to him was recorded as part of the
Qur’an - and has been recited ever since.
Blind Abdullah, incidentally, went on to become an important Muslim in
his own right, and served as the Prophet’s (pbuh) deputy and prayer-leader of
Madinah in the Prophet’s (pbuh) absence several times.
But, of course, I want to talk to you young
people. You crop of young scholars of
I really do pray that studying your faith
as you did will make a difference in your lives. Being given Islam is to be
given a very precious gift.
Some people get lovely presents (when they
get married, for example), and never use them, but simply ‘save then for best’.
They try to preserve them by shutting them up in boxes or cupboards. They look
after them, but do not USE them. It is such a shame, really. It is what the
Prophet (pbuh) called ‘hoarding’, and he didn’t like it.
I learned this lesson through my marriage
to my first husband, George. I was given some lovely things which I put away
for best. Quarter of a century later, I got divorced – and when I was sorting
everything out, when our marriage was completely over and he had gone, I came
across these lovely things our friends had given us for our marriage, which had
never been used. We had wasted those gifts – don’t waste the gifts of your
lives, and your Islam – your belief in God.
Islam is the most precious gift you will
EVER be given. It means that instead of just drifting through your years,
wasting them, and never really feeling fulfilled or that there is a point to it
all, you will live in a totally different way. You will be aware that there really is a Supreme Being who loves you,
that there really is life after death, that there really are angels – in fact,
you have at least two each, and they are all here with us now, in this hall -
watching over you and listening to me speak!
Use your Islam well. Don’t just put it away
and keep it for best – RISK using it. Even risk making mistakes and having
breakages.
By Islam – I don’t just mean all the
important things that Muslims learn to DO. These are indeed very vital, and all
expressions of our love for Allah.
I also mean the most important thing of all
– something I call kalb - handing
your HEART over to Allah.
The Prophet (pbuh) said that there were
some people whose Islam was in their mouths, but it never went down below their
throats. It never reached their hearts. He said there were pious people who
fasted more than all the required times and who prayed all night long – but all
they ever really gained from it was the experience of being tired and hungry.
Your Islam should become your Life.
Never be frightened that you could waste
it, or use it all up. That’s impossible – it has an inexhaustible Source. God
is the Generous Giver – He just keeps on giving more and more and more.
Never be frightened that you will be a
failure, and God will be angry with you – don’t get the image that God is like
a nasty mean old cantankerous adult who will always find something wrong with you
to pick at. He wants you to LOVE Him, not fear Him. So often we read
translations of the Qur’an that use the word ‘fear’ and urge us to ‘fear’
Allah. It is the wrong word. What they mean is to be in awe of Him, to have
great reverence towards Him. Allah loves you, with all your weaknesses and
failings. You only need to fear Him
if, - at the end of your life when you are facing judgement – if you have
stubbornly insisted on being a nasty, selfish, deceitful, cruel vindictive,
abusive person, when you actually knew better. Even if you were only sorry at
the very last moment, you would be forgiven.
Did you know that if you are mentally ill,
or the balance of your mind is disturbed, or perhaps you are as thick as a
plank and only have the brains of a lettuce to work with – you are ALWAYS
forgiven, (and insha’Allah in your life to come things will be so different for
you).
Never be frightened that you will get
things wrong. So what if you do? God is the Compassionate One, the Forgiver –
and once you realise you have made a mistake and regret it, you can just put it
behind you and start all over again. This counts the same whether you are 9
years old, or 19, or 90!
So, in my speech tonight, I want to talk
about 3 things – farming, cooking and banking.
I’ve already done a bit about farming –
preparing a field, sewing the seeds and reaping a harvest. Now let’s think
about one of the Prophet’s (pbuh) favourite farm animals – sheep. Do you know what
a sheep is? It’s something somebody wants for dinner – your Mum, a wolf, a
bandit, a generous host. But if we just shift our consciousness a little, we
can see it is also something else.
The Prophet Jesus (pbuh) taught several
lessons about sheep. One of them involved a shepherd who had a very large flock
– a hundred sheep. Every night he would count them in to the place where they
would sleep, and instead of sleeping himself, he would keep guard over them so
that no bandits or wild animals would get at them. One night he counted them,
and there were only 99. One was missing. So, this forced upon him a moment of
choice – what should he do? A hired shepherd, who probably didn’t care much for
the sheep (they were only his job), would probably shrug his shoulders, be
momentarily cross that he had lost one, and go to sleep. The good shepherd,
however (who in Jesus’ story meant God Himself), would not sleep. He would make
sure the 99 were safe, then he would go out into the darkness looking for the
one that was missing. When he found it - probably dirty or wounded, and
certainly lost – he would pick it up and lay it over his neck, and carry it all
the way back on his shoulders. Jesus was talking about people, really, not
sheep - and he said that there was more joy among the angels when a lost one
was found and brought back than over all the 99 who had been safe all along.
This gives a moment of INSIGHT. Do you get
it? He was talking about ME; He was talking about YOU. The world is full of
sheep, wandering about getting lost and into difficulties. God is the Shepherd
of our souls, and as our Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) pointed out, He loves us far
more than a shepherd does his or her sheep.
If you have been lost, I want you to be
that sheep that got found. I like to think that after all its terror, it ended
the night snuggled up in the lap of the Shepherd, safe from all the storms and
wolves.
Now I’ll talk about cooking. I want you to
be BISCUITS. What are biscuits? A collection of dry flour, a sprinkle of sugar,
a splash of water, and maybe some wrinkled old dry grapes – ie. raisins. Yukh!
None of those things is particularly appetising. But mix it all together and
add heat in an oven – what do you get? A lovely biscuit. We don’t want a raw
one, or a half-baked one, but one that is fully cooked. The world is full of
ingredients, but I want you to be a biscuit.
Now, what about banking? This image gives
us something that is going on and increasing in value while nobody sees. If you
pay your money in, you will be building up a
balance while nobody is looking.
Allah asked us to ‘give Him a beautiful loan’. Of course, He did not
want our money – but He wants our hearts and our lives.
Sometimes we make the effort and do nice
things for others – but we might get a bit fed up, because we are taken for
granted, and nobody has seen or noticed what we did. Cheer up – the good deed
went into the bank. It WAS seen, by Allah and His angels, and it was recorded
in your bank balance ready for your credit to be shown to you away in the
future, on the Day of Judgement.
Sometimes we act badly, and do something
really wrong – and think we have got away with it because nobody saw what we
did. You think so? No way – it WAS seen, and recorded, and you will come to
face it again one day. The Prophet (pbuh) taught that no matter how saintly we
might be, as well as our angels each of us has at least one jinn, called a qareen, who accompanies us throughout
life, trying to make us go wrong.
You might be one of those lucky people who
has never had a malicious or selfish or dishonest thought in your life. Think
about that moment when you are all alone in the room with a teacher, who, as
she leaves the room, drops a £20 note. Straight away, you are faced with a
test, a moment of decision. Nobody knows but you. Assuming you have a normally
working conscience, you KNOW what you should
do, but if there is a moment of hesitation, up pops the qareen with the thought that nobody saw it! The teacher has plenty
of money, she won’t miss it. You could even justify taking it by using it for a
highly noble cause – maybe helping out your own struggling family, or sending
it through a charity to help folks in a disaster zone. And so on.
Life’s tests are not always easy or
clear-cut. Decisions can be very tricky sometimes. Imagine there are two
patients in hospital who will both die unless they get a heart transplant, and
there is only one heart available. How would you decide who to give it to? You
would probably choose the youngest, or the one most likely to pull through, or
make a decision as to which of them was the most valuable to society. Suppose
the two patients are both female – one ten years old and the other forty? Pick
the young one? But then, suppose the forty-year-old had children to bring
up? And was caring for an aged parent?
Now suppose you had the chance to save six
people or one person? Seems easy – but supposing six patients needing
transplants were all lying in hospital,
and the one person was a perfectly healthy chap innocently standing in the
waiting room. Would you kill that one person and give the organs to the half
dozen?
Luckily for us, Islam teaches that there is
a difference between the records in our two books – the record of our good
deeds and intentions is permanent, and never gets rubbed out, but the record of
our bad deeds only stays in our bank balance until we think about the way we
behaved and the hurt we caused, and are sorry for it. The moment we are sorry,
the bad record is wiped out – and we have the chance to be sorry right up to
our final moments in this life.
What goes into our account is the record of
our choices, when faced with conscious decisions.
Let’s think about how we can serve Allah
with kalb, with our hearts. Here’s an
example. Suppose the time for prayer comes, and you want to go to the mosque to
pray, but your mother or your child is ill, and needs you. How should you serve
God best in this situation? The important thing is that as Muslims we MUST put
God first, before anything else – and therefore we must do His will. This means
- we must care for the sick one who needs
us. Get it? Allah will not mind if we do not go to the mosque – our prayer
can be said anywhere.
Here’s a hadith recorded in both Bukhari
and Muslim collections. Some people once went to the Prophet (pbuh) and
introduced him to a stranger. ‘Who is he?’ the Prophet (pbuh) asked. They told
him proudly that this was a saintly man who was so religious that he had
decided to cut himself off from normal life and spend all his time devoted to
prayer. They thought the Prophet (Pbuh) would be very pleased with him. To
their surprise, he asked: ‘Who looks after his food?’ ‘Well, we all do,’ they said. ‘Then all of you,’ said the Prophet
(pbuh) ‘are better than he is.’
Here’s another story, from Bukhari. The
Prophet’s (pbuh) friends noticed a man who really worked hard and sacrificed
himself – if only he was more religious. He would be really wonderful if his
actions were devoted to Allah, they said. Do you know what the Prophet (pbuh)
replied? ‘If this man is working to support his children, his aged parents, or
even to keep himself independent of aid, then all his work may be regarded as a
struggle (or jihad) in the cause of
Allah.
Why have I been taken from my home, and
brought all the way here? Does it matter? Is it important? I am just an old
lady now, a grandma, a doddery old nitwit. You have honoured me by inviting me
to come here, but I am not important. I am not even a very good Muslim. I do
lots of things wrong, and make a mess of lots of things. I have studied a bit,
but I know very little - I don’t even
know if I’ll get to the end of this speech. Something could happen, the ceiling
fall in on me, and I would be gone.
But I believe with all my heart that there
must have been a reason why God
wanted me to come here, why He used me. I don’t mean that in a conceited way –
but I believe that God has a reason for everything, that nothing in this life
is pointless, even if we never know what the reason was. It may well be that
without my knowing, God has been able to touch somebody’s life, touch
somebody’s heart.
Remember, there are two ways of living –
with God, or without Him; with belief or without it. I congratulate you so much
on your efforts, and your successes, and pray that you may grow in love for
Him, and find all sorts of ways of serving Him.
May Allah reward all of you for all your
efforts for His sake, and keep you close to Him throughout the rest of your
lives. Amin.