How Patience and Prayer Defeat Hardship
Seeking Aid in Patience and Prayer: Understanding Surah Al-Baqarah 2:45
Summary
This lecture discusses the Quranic verse about seeking aid in patience and prayer (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:45) from the chapter on patience. The speaker explains how fasting and prayer serve as tools to help believers endure hardships, emphasizing that all difficulties are temporary and that patience combined with prayer provides both immediate relief and long-term spiritual guidance. The lecture explores how patience and prayer work together: patience provides the immediate response to hardship while prayer and Quranic reflection redirect one's inner forces and energies toward constructive purposes.
The speaker addresses how shaitan operates through discouragement and manipulation, including using others to disparage believers who stumble. He emphasizes that a single failure does not define one's character, and that hopelessness is shaitan's most powerful tool against humans. The lecture uses the analogy of stopping a river with a wall to explain why merely suppressing human desires and energies leads to destructive outcomes; instead, these forces must be redirected through proper channels like marriage and spiritual devotion.
The speaker concludes by illustrating how the companions used patience and prayer to redirect their energies positively, warning that repression without redirection of these inner forces can lead to spiritual failure despite initially appearing righteous.
Note: This transcript was generated using YouTube's automatic captioning, with AI-assisted cleanup for readability. It may contain inaccuracies due to background noise, audio quality, or limitations of the transcription software — particularly during Arabic recitation. Listener discretion is advised; please refer to the original video for precise wording.
Alhamdulillah. Continuing in authored by in the chapter of patience and says, "And Allah the most high has also said that which translates to and seek aid in patience and prayer. Indeed, Allah is with the patient. We mentioned Thursday morning the statement of some of the that patience here is another term for fasting. So fasting and salah the verse starts to mean seek aid meaning on your hardships when you are faced with calamities seek aid to get you through the difficulties seek aid in fasting and prayer indeed Allah is with the patient ones fasting has an incredible effect on a person's on a person's hardship and on the way that they see that said hardship. When a person fasts, they prevent themselves from eating or drinking or having sexual pleasure during the daylight hours. When a person breaks his fast, that hardship is relieved. It is relieved immediately. And food has never tasted so good. And water has never quenched so well one's thirst. And this is a sped up kind of microcosm of the dunya that a person has a hardship. It's important for a person to constantly remember that all hardships are temporary in the life of this world. All of them. And as soon as the hardship is relieved, it is as if it never happened. The only thing that a person is left with is the lessons they've learned about themselves and about Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Also the statement other scholars of have mentioned that patience here is as it sounds. Seek aid in patience and prayer in order to be patient during the difficulties. Now, when we put patience and prayer together, what does that really mean? What does that translate to? What what things do these two acts of worship, patience and prayer, how do they complement one another in a way that make them together appropriate to help get a person through the difficulties of a crisis? And that is that the immediate response of a person when faced with a hardship or an undesirable or anything that a person is striving to get through something that is undesirable to them. The first reaction that a person is to train himself to have is patience. It doesn't work every time. And just because a person doesn't have patience one moment doesn't mean that they have no patience. And it doesn't mean that a person is not patient. Everyone has good days and bad days. Everyone. And everyone has times when they stumble and when they fall. But losing one battle doesn't mean that a person has lost the war. If a person exhibits cowardice or fear during one battle, it doesn't mean that they are entirely a coward. It just means that that is an occurrence. That's not a pattern. These are things that a shaitan uses to try to convince the human being, to try to convince the Muslim that they're not worthy, they're beyond help, they shouldn't even try. And sometimes a shaitan puts his words in the mouths of a of a man's brothers. Sometimes a shaitan puts his words in the mouths of other Muslims around his his target or his victim. The prophet sallallah.aii alaihi wasallam once was brought a man who had drank alcohol and he commanded that the man be beat and we say beat it's not you know breaking bones and drawing blood but it is a kind of you know a kind of this is before the regulation of 80 or 40 foggs in the time of. And so as this was occurring, one of the companions said is it's a demeaning term, right? How often this man is brought for this same issue. This is not the first time. This is not the second time with this same man. And so the prophet sallallah.aii wasallam said, "Do not aid a shan against your brother." Notice that word there. Do not aid a shan against your brother. First of all, any one of us were it not for the grace of Allah would be in the position of the lowest amongst us. It is only Allah's grace that has us where we are. Number two, a shan uses other people as we will hear in another narration in this chapter uses people around a target of his in order to disparage, discourage, insult, put down, etc. This is how a shaitan operates. If he tries and attempts to whisper to a person and does not get through, he will whisper to the next closest person to him. If he does not get through, he will whisper to the guy at the door or whisper to the guy in the car next next in the next lane. He will whisper to everyone around that person to try and turn those around him against him in order to achieve his goals. The prophet Sam said whomever Allah desires good for he will turn a people against him. It's a narration that we will get to later in the chapter. As we mentioned before, what types of trees have the most stones thrown at them? We mentioned this in a previous talk. What types of trees have the most stones thrown at them? The ones with the juiciest fruits. Those are the ones people are trying to take its fruits and pillage. Not the ones with the sour fruits. they don't get attention. And so when we look at the way that Allah subhanahu wa tala is structured three chapters of the Quran, surahunus, surah, surah yuf. Why are they in that way? Surahunus is a description of the age-old difference between the prophets and their enemies. and all the arguments for polytheism and all of the arguments and reputations of Islam against polytheism. The next chapter hood is about the prophets and their enemies from amongst the disbelievers. Surah yuf is about a man and his brothers and how even a person's own people may turn against him. And this is something that the prophet sallallah.aii wasallam was given to gear him up and ready him for the arrival in Medina and the joining of the hypocrites who would masquerade as Muslims and prove to be the most harmful enemy yet. So the point here that is being made is that just because a person gets out of character or out of sorts once doesn't mean that that is their character. Do not allow yourself to be convinced by a shaitan of these things. A person who is a believer wants himself to be better. And so he is hyper sensitive of his shortcomings. And when he sees a shortcoming in himself, he starts to lose hope that Allah could make him better. He starts to lose hope that he's getting anywhere. And this is exactly what a shaitan wants. The most useful tool that a shaitan has against any human being is hopelessness. When a person becomes hopeless, they become dangerous to themselves and those around them. And so Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala here tells us seek aid in patience and in prayer. Meaning that the first response to a difficulty, the first response to a crisis, the first response is to slow everything down and not be reactive. Do not just speak. Do not just do the first impulse that comes into your mind. Be patient. Seek aid and patience. But you have a force inside of you and you can't just stuff that force down all the time. It will eventually come out if you just repress that force inside of you. Whether it's a force of anger or a force of creativity or a force of autonomy or independence or a force of whatever forces that you have inside of you, if you just try to stuff it away and wall it, eventually that pressure will build up and it will explode out just water. Allah tells us this in his book that the powers and energies inside of a human being, right? The forces inside the human being, the force of creativity, the force of independence, the force of autonomy, the force of the force of love and lust or pleasure. these forces that are innately inside of the human being intrinsically. If you it's a it's a river that is running. If you try to just stop that river with a wall and build a wall to stop that river, not one drop gets by, it will eventually break down that wall and destroy the city beneath. It will be worse than it was before you started. The only solution to such energy is to redirect it. That redirecting of force is what allows a person to be able to take those things which are seemingly bad about himself and turn them into a force to be used for good. This is why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala didn't prohibit intimacy between a man and woman entirely. No, there is a type of intimacy. However, a man is allowed to get married. He's encouraged to get married, etc. There is an outlet for this force. So, a person to just be patient immediately, that's not enough. That's an immediate that's a band-aid. That's to get you to the hospital. But you need to work out and redirect that force. What do you redirect that force with? You seek instruction in the Quran. Which is why Allah then mentions prayer. So you are patient in the immediate and then you use prayer and you contemplate the Quran and you meditate on the Quran and you seek wisdom from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala through the Quran which is most prominently recited during prayer and now you find the solutions of how to redirect those energies and this is what the companions did. We know the narration of a man who would do the acts of paradise until he is one arm's length away from paradise and then decree comes into play and at the very end he starts to do the acts of the people of the hellfire and enters it. Why? Why does that happen? Well, one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons is repression of energy that has not been redirected. It has not been worked out. And I'm not talking about going to therapy to work it out. These are actions and acts of the heart. They can only be solved by the Quran and the sunnah of the prophet sallall.aii. and.
[Silence]
Subhanalam. and a Vienna Muhammad.