Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

Wa-lākin yu’akhkhiruhum ilā ajal
musammā
— however He gives them extra time, until a time that has been
decreed by Him. 
Fa-idhā jā’a ajaluhum, lā yasta’khirūn sāʿah wa-lā
yastaqdimūn—
but when their time comes, when the deadline arrives, they’re not
going to be able to bring it any earlier and they’re not going to be able to delay it
any further.
Now we get to the 
āyāt
that I started with:
They assign to Allah what they dislike for themselves and their
tongues utter a sheer lie in stating that a happy state awaits them.
Without doubt the Fire awaits them and it is to it that they shall be
hastened.
(Al-Nahl 16: 61)
They put for Allah what they hate themselves and their tongues make
elaborate lies that they are going to have the best. No, no. Those people, they get
the Fire. So many 
āyāt
, one after the other after the other after the other about
how angry Allah is at people who are saddened at the idea of daughters, they are
saddened at that idea, 
subḥān Allāh
!
Now let’s think about the positive, let’s switch the subject. What are we
supposed to do with our daughters, what are they? When the Prophet (
ṣallā Allāh
ʿalayhi wa-sallam
) says: 
fa-aḥsana ilayhinna
; and in another hadith: 
wa-ttaqā
Allāh fīhinn
—he had 
taqwā
of Allah when it came to them. When he spoke to
them he had 
taqwā
of Allah, when he thought about them he had 
taqwā
of Allah,
when he was thinking about getting them married he had 
taqwā
of Allah. He
wasn’t thinking let me just get this over with, ‘Why don’t you just marry him?
So what if you don’t like him. Stop embarrassing my family. Just get married to
your cousin,’ and he forces her to get married. He has no 
taqwā
of Allah.
A woman comes to 
Rasūl Allāh
(
ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-sallam
) and says my
father forced me to marry someone. What should I do? I didn’t want to get
married, but he still got me married. And he said that nikah is 
bāṭil
, that marriage
is null and void. It’s cancelled; it doesn’t count. How many Muslim girls are

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being forced into getting married, and when they say ‘no’ they get yelled at and
psychologically tortured. ‘Why are you not listening? Why are you making
things hard on the family? What is wrong with you? Why are you embarrassing
us like this? I knew I should have had a son.’ They have to hear all this garbage.
All this garbage.
All of it is done away with just one expression: 
fa-aḥsana ilayhinna
, or 
wa-
ttaqā Allāh fīhinn
. The Prophet (
ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-sallam
) said when he
talks to them, he has 
taqwā
of Allah. They are going to be speaking on
judgement day about what rights they had. Allah has given them certain rights
and your job as 
walī
is not to tell them what to do, but to protect their rights.
That’s your job as a father, that’s my job as a father, to protect their rights. To
ensure their happiness, not your happiness, their happiness. That’s having 
taqwā
of Allah in their matter. We tell them to have 
taqwā
of Allah, so they should do
whatever we want. It’s the other way around.
This is the 
amānah
of daughters: how softly we have to speak with our
daughters, how kind we have to be with them. I’ve seen so many cases. There
are people that email me from all over the world; the girl tells me my father tells
me I’m fat and I’m ugly and nobody’s going to marry me and I can’t say
anything because he’s my father. So could you please tell me what to do? I don’t
know what to tell this girl. I do know what to tell her father though: