Attitude of gratitude

Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

⚠️ Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful. All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds. My dear respected brothers, sisters, elders, I thought today it's a good idea to look at the, what I like to call the other side of the picture. We live in a world today where thanks to what news is presented and how it is presented, we have a very dark and dismal and depressing picture of our life and times. And that is because only bad news sells. And in a profit-driven world, ruled by predatory capitalist barons, nothing which doesn't make money can survive. For example, the root cause of our environmental crisis is that when net worth is measured only in dollars, then wood has value, not a standing forest. So felling of forest makes profit, but left untouched, it represents what we call unexploited opportunity. Having said that, let us see what the reality of our world is, really, by comparing it with what it was 50 years ago. That is within my lifetime. I'm not talking about ancient history. Take infant mortality, malnutrition, treatment for heart disease. Running hot and cold water in the bathrooms when you turn on your shower. Elevators, refrigerators, televisions, is that a blessing or not? Telephones and a thousand other conveniences that we take for granted were either not there or were in a very nascent stage, which you can only see in a museum today. My father, Rahmatul Ali, before the age of 40, had three heart attacks. And the only treatment was to take rest and not eat oily foods and not eat too much meat and so on. That's it. Because angioplasty and bypass surgery had not been invented until then. Neither had cataract surgery. In my city in Hyderabad, one of our nobles, Fakhrul Mughal Bahadur, built a palace in 1870. It stands today, which has 600 rooms. 150 of them were furnished with Louis XVI furniture from France. Today, the cost of Louis XVI chairs ranges from $2,400 to $24,000 per chair. Now, I'm not saying that Fakhrul Mughal paid that price, but obviously he still paid a fortune. But that's not the point of my story. My point of my story is to ask you to think about this. When you are standing in your shower with hot water raining down on your head, adjust it to just the right temperature and reflect on the fact that this wonderful palace didn't have a shower with running hot and cold water. It also didn't have flushed toilets. It also doesn't have air conditioning, which in the summer in Hyderabad where the temperature goes to 120 degrees is useful. Remember that money was not the issue. The technology didn't exist. Now, go further back in history and look at all the great monarchs and their palaces and the luxury they lived in and so on. And you will realize that some of the most common essential conveniences that we are used to and we believe we can't do without them were not available to people who ruled entire nations. My question is, are we conscious of this and do we thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for it? Gratitude is the platform on which happiness runs. We all want to be happy, but how many of us are consciously grateful? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala began his book with reminding us to be grateful. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen. All praise and all thanks is to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, the creator, protector, sustainer of the universe. Rabbil Alameen. We read this ayah in every rakat of every salawat. Do we contemplate on it? Do we reflect on it? And do we count the number of things that we need to thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for? So let's start doing that right now. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, Allah said, which means, and He, jalla jalaluhu, has granted you all that you asked Him for. If you try to count, just count, we're not talking about being grateful and expressing grateful, just count. If you try to count Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's blessings, you will never be able to number them. Indeed,