Coming up on DTNS, Facebook wants some of you to help predict things. The Oculus Go is now the Oculus Gone, but there may be a new way to get apps on the quest, and why Apple switching to ARM won't kill Intel. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the bright forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And now the show's producer and used car buyer, Roger Chin. We were just talking all about Flip Cup, and what we thought of the Apple announcement presentation. I'm going to talk about that a little more later. If you want to get that wider conversation, join our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Adobe published a new support page on its website that Flash Player support is ending on December 31st, 2020. Put it on your calendar, but it does plan to release security updates until then. Users should uninstall Flash Player software on their devices before the end of the year, and the company plans to give users lots of notifications about support ending as well. So it shouldn't be a surprise to you anyway. Also, most browsers already limit Flash Player functionality and plan to remove support for Flash late this year or early 2021. To Flash. Cheers. Cheers. Hold that, because Fast Company reports that Segway will retire the Segway PT and stop production July 15th. 21 employees will be laid off, 12 will stay on temporarily to handle warranties and repairs on the Segway, and that have already been sold. Apologies. Five employees working on Segway Discovery scooters will remain at the company. The first two-wheeled Segway was released in December 2001 for $5,000 American dollars. To the Segway. Cheers. U.S. dollars. Acer refreshed its Predator Helios Triton and Nitro gaming laptops. The Predator Helios gets Intel 10th Gen H-Series processors in NVIDIA 2070 and 2080 Super Max Q graphics, so does the Triton. The Helios 700 is the top of the line, starting at $2,400, coming to the U.S. in October. Still has that slide-out keyboard and trackpad that reveals the cooling apparatus, looks really nice. Acer also announced the Predator X25 Gaming 1080p monitor, but with a 360 Hz refresh rate and native support for NVIDIA G-Sync and a sensor to adjust brightness, no price on the monitor yet. China's GPS rival network, known as Beidou, launched its final navigation satellite to complete its own global navigation system Tuesday. Beidou has been in development for over 20 years. The launch was broadcast on state media channel CGTN and declared a success at 10.15 AM Beijing time. More than 600 AI scientists called for Springer Nature not to publish a conference paper titled A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing. The letter debunked the scientific basis for the paper and also called for publishers to commit not to publish papers based on similar debunked methodology in the future. Springer said the paper was submitted to a conference but was rejected after a peer review and will not be published. Twitter has placed one of the president of the United States tweets behind a warning label for what Twitter calls the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group. Users must click on the warning to view the tweet and may not like, reply, or retweet without comment. Twitter has previously hidden one tweet from the president and flagged two of his tweets as making false claims. The European Commission's latest evaluation of the 2016 Code of Conduct for countering hate speech online found 90% of flagged content was assessed within 24 hours, which is up 81% in 2018. On measures of transparency and feedback to users, Facebook was found to respond systematically while all other platforms had room for improvement. Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynolds welcomed the good results. Additional rules on this are expected to be part of the new Digital Services Act, which is coming later this year and the Commission is looking into binding transparency measures as well. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about not hate the app this time, but Apple's App Store Guidelines. Patrick, what do they got? Indeed, Apple announced a new appeal process for developers found to violate App Store Guidelines. Developers may appeal their own violations and the guideline itself. Apple also says it will no longer delay updates intended to fix bugs or other core functions even if the app is under dispute for guideline violations. So hay making a stink did have an effect. I think you can draw a straight line to Basecamp complaining about the problems with the hay app being rejected for a bug update. Remember, Apple didn't reject the hay app initially. They put it in the store. Then on a bug fix decided, oh, this should really have the in app payments. It doesn't do anything if you don't have that and rejected the bug fix. So this makes sense. Apple saying, you know what? That was dumb. If an app's in the store and all you're doing is bug fixes, we shouldn't let a buggy app be in the store. That's not making anything better for anyone, so that's good. Developers having an appeal, that's big. That's something developers are really complained about is, I don't feel like I have any recourse if I think there is a mistake that has been made. Which is really frustrating and even anxiety inducing for a developer, because when you're faced with a big company where you don't have someone to call or get a hold of to even understand what exactly the problem is, it's a very difficult situation. Here it seems like they're taking steps to at least try to address this. It remains to be seen, however, what happens when you appeal and your appeal is rejected. Is it automated? Do you get someone to talk to? It could be an improvement. It could remain the same. Well because even if you could get someone to tell you why your app was rejected, you couldn't argue it with them. There was nowhere to go with that. And that's what happened to Basecamp is they said, look, we rejected this bug fix because you shouldn't be in the app store anyway. Basecamp being big enough, they were able to get some people to respond, but general developers kind of chimed in and said, yeah, we didn't want to complain in public because we don't want to ruin our relationship, but we have the same problem of even if we get a person to explain why we've been rejected, we don't get to say, I don't think that's fair. I don't think that's right. Or I don't think my app is actually violating these guidelines. So at least providing some kind of process for that is important. Well, especially because if Apple, you know, if Apple was just sort of like, no, we've rejected you and there's nothing you can do about it, then there wouldn't be a dispute. If there's a dispute, it means either side might win this dispute. And that's why you go through the process of it. So being able to push through bug fixes because the app developer may indeed be the winner of this dispute is the right call. Yeah. And like you say, Patrick, it'll be interesting to see how it's handled.  Well, we mentioned yesterday that Microsoft is closing its mixer service on July 22nd and immediately beginning to move partner streamers over to Facebook Gaming. Top streamers, Ninja, who was signed to Mixer in August and Shroud, who signed in October, have both received full payouts. Facebook apparently tried to sign both, but the two streamers declined and are free to move where they wish. They both tweeted somewhat big things about not knowing what they're doing, but that they care about their community. Mixer streamers using monetization will be eligible for Facebook's level up program. Mixer viewers with outstanding ember balances, channel subscriptions or mixer pro subscriptions will receive Xbox gift card credit. On July 22nd, all mixer sites and apps will redirect to Facebook Gaming and Microsoft will also work to let Facebook Game viewers click to begin laying games on the X Cloud Game streaming service. As for the low latency streaming technology from Mixer, Microsoft will hold on to that and use it in Microsoft Teams. Well, that's cool. At least the beam technology, which is is what Microsoft bought to create Mixer won't be lost. They'll still be used and it'll be used in an enterprise situation. I think that's a little bit of what we're seeing here is Microsoft saying productivity and enterprise is what we're good at. We also make a really good game machine and we're not going to stop that. But gaming content, not our thing. It's Facebook's thing. Let's let's just, you know, cut our losses while we can. Does that seem like what's going on to you, Patrick? There's definitely a let's cut our losses while we can. I think everyone was expecting Mixer to at some point. Be cut by Microsoft. I don't think anyone expected it to happen this quickly. And it might actually be a shrewd move by Microsoft to say, you know what? It's not working. Everyone else has been growing like crazy during the pandemic and the lockdown. We grew like half a percent. It's just not working. Let's close it down now because we don't intend on investing whatever, 15 billion dollars to grow it over the next five years. So let's close it now and not just let it die slowly over the next couple of years and close it in two years anyway. The live streaming ecosystem is still pretty vibrant. I think Facebook gaming is not regarded as a cool platform by the core gaming community, but I've heard various reports that it's actually performing pretty well for the people who are there. And there's also YouTube, which is to an extent pushing its live component and gaming subsection, which has the power of regular YouTube, of course. I suspect Shroud will go back to Twitch and Ninja will go to YouTube because relationships with Twitch are not great for him. Yeah, apparently Facebook, you know, by all the reports, dangled a lot of cash in front of Shroud and Ninja to keep them. If people don't know, those are two top streamers that were lured away to Mixer with exclusive contracts that Microsoft had to buy out when they shut down Mixer. They didn't have to go to Facebook because of that contract being bought out. Facebook tried to convince them, but apparently the amount of money was not the issue and the relationships, it sounds like from what you're saying, Patrick, probably outweighed it. For Ninja, I think the relationship with Twitch is what means he was he's not going to go back to Twitch. For Facebook, it seems like the numbers we're hearing is for Ninja. The contract was a multi-year deal that netted him $30 million and Shroud was 10 million. They were supposed to stay a few years. They ended up staying one year in the case of Ninja and a few months in the case of Shroud. I think at that point, if you have 10 million dollars in your pocket, 10 more millions is probably not going to make you quote unquote sell out and go to a community that you feel isn't right for you. So yeah, that's probably going to work out like that. So when people criticize them for moving to Mixer, I mean, they actually ended up doing pretty well. I mean, they made a lot of money and a lot of money. Facebook is discontinuing sales of the Oculus Go. We're saying goodbye to a third thing in this show. Goodbye, Oculus Go. The Oculus product mine, I didn't realize you.  The Oculus Store is going to stop accepting apps or updates after December 4th and stop adding those apps December 18th. So if you get your app into the Oculus Store by December 4th, you have to publish it by the 18th. Oculus also announced it will introduce a way to distribute Quest apps outside of the Oculus Store. So the Oculus Quest, the one you have, Sarah, is now the future of this class of VR headset. And it's got much better specs. It's more expensive, but it's got much better specs than the Go. And now you can you can they're going to introduce a way to have a Quest app available without having it go through the Oculus Store, but isn't side loading. That's going to happen in 2021. So I'm very curious what that means in a related story. Facebook has acquired ready at Don Studios, the developer behind the Lone Echo VR games for the Oculus. The studio has been a publishing partner with Facebook and Oculus. Lone Echo 2 had its launch date repeatedly delayed after initially announcing a 2019 launch, but as expected sometime this year. So, you know, Oculus definitely bulking up its its in-house games, but but trying to figure out a way to encourage development with this not side loading, but not in the store way is intriguing to me. Yeah, the whole Oculus Go going away. And I have I've never I've never tried Oculus Go, but I do have a Quest and understanding what I do about the Quest and thinking, well, the Go be useful for it would be really hard to go the other way.  You know, it was only around for a couple of years.  But yeah, for the Quest, going through the store, which is, you know, the games are fairly expensive. Some of them are free, but most of them, you know, are upwards of 30 bucks. So to me, I'm like, the store is full of stuff that I can't afford to buy anyway. So it's not exactly a ghost town, but of all the developers who are, you know, kind of trying to get stuff in the pipeline, not necessarily looking to go through just the sort of waiting period and the acceptance period of going through the Oculus store and just getting, you know, more variety of games and all sorts of stuff that you can do with the Quest. Sounds like a great idea to me. Yeah, the the goal for those who don't know the big drawback is that it doesn't have a movement tracking. You can only do rotations. And that basically kills a VR thing because it also includes the controller. But Facebook is definitely not giving up on on VR if some people get that impression from the issue with the go. And ready at dawn is a great developer. They're really pushing VR still. So they might make it happen. Yeah, that stand up tracking is often referred to as six degrees of freedom. The goal only had three degrees of freedom. And so that's the other thing here is this is the end of three degrees of freedom. You got to have six degrees of freedom to be a product. Facebook also launched forecast a project from its research and development team to build a community around predictions. So, for example, users could create a question that another user could vote on like, would the MLB have a season this year? Sounds like something Tom might ask. Questions will be reviewed and edited for clarity. Users have a certain number of in-app points they can use to decide which questions to vote on. And then voters can then discuss why they predicted what they did. People in Canada and the U.S. can request and invite into the forecast beta if it sounds interesting to you. And the initial users will be selected from health, research and academic communities. Anybody can see the predictions and related discussions at forecast app.net and polls can be shared outside of the app as well. Forecast app is now live on iOS. Yeah, I went to forecast app.net. That's where I pulled that MLB question. So, yes, that was of interest to me. And right now it's 77% chance, yes, out of 35 forecasters. But one of the intriguing things about this system was the promise of like, I could see those forecasters, the people who voted, justify their prediction about why they were picking yes or no, especially the no people, I'd like to see that. But there doesn't seem to be a way to access that yet at forecast app.net. The other thing that I find interesting about this, Patrick, is if Facebook had launched this 10 years ago, it would have been everybody can make a question and everybody can vote on it and the wisdom of the crowds will prevail and we'll get a better result of what these predictions might be. And in 2020, it's a very limited number of vetted experts will be allowed to submit questions and make predictions and everybody will get to see them. But we're not going with the wisdom of the crowds. We're going with the wisdom of a curated number of experts. Yeah, it seems like the way things are now for most of the social network activity. It's probably a good thing, although looking at the list of questions, I'm seeing some that are relatively trivial, but it seems a majority of them have essentially less than five percent of one answer and over 95 percent of the other answer. Some of them are a little bit more nuanced, but it kind of makes me I guess two thirds of them are very slanted. Kind of makes me wonder if this app, you know, even the wisdom of the crowd for the answers is that going to be useful at all? And it also makes me think Facebook seems to be trying a lot of things and very few of them are working out their big properties. Actually, the only properties that matter are things that they purchased and good on them for trying new things. But I don't think in the past five years, anything has worked out. So it's just, you know, maybe they were just lucky and not that. Incredibly, I don't know. It's just something that came through. Yeah, no, they haven't had a lot of independent successes from from internal launches. You're right, other than there may be some features on Facebook, but but none of these projects, my big concern with forecast here is that they are they they're not even with a curated number of experts. I don't think they're going to have accuracy because you either get large numbers to get that wisdom of the crowds effect or you get people who really know what they're talking about. And that's not what they're going for here either. Like anybody can do any question and answer any question, whether it's within their expertise or not. So it's to me, almost the worst of both worlds. And it seems like there's only two choices for answers. So it's some of them have three, but most of them are right. It's a yes or no. So, yeah. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, we're going to talk a little bit more about arm and Apple's big announcement yesterday of moving their Macs and their desktops, their Mac, both laptop and desktop to arm and what effect that will have now that we've had a little time to process it. But first, Patrick, I want to get your reactions now that we've had a day to think about it to WWDC. I really like the format. I think that's almost the biggest takeaway. It was incredible production value. And I think the same way that Apple has set the standard for stage presentations in the past 20 years, I suppose, I think this is going to be the standard for those who want to have an efficient, snappy, attractive, enjoyable, pre-recorded presentation. It was really great. And the contents were great as well, really interesting stuff. But the format was unexpectedly enjoyable. Yeah, it really moved. And of course, the demos all worked.  But it's actually better when you see how the product is supposed to work. Granted, it's not a live demo then. But what do you think is anything stick out, particularly on what they announced? I mean, all the big things, but I'm going to get maybe a smaller one just for the sake of fun. The hand washing tracker on the Apple Watch the Apple Watch was surprising and kind of delightful. And we all think of it in the context of the COVID pandemic, of course. But it could help with the seasonal flu. It could help with a lot of things if it actually works in the way it's supposed to. And the cleverness of how it's designed. You know, the tracking, the movement tracking tracks for movement that it thinks might be hand washing. And then it turns on the mic to listen for water and soap noises to confirm that it is probably that. I felt that was, again, delightfully clever. Apple's moved to using its own chip designs based on ARM for its laptop and desktop certainly is a big change. Apple had 6.9 percent of the worldwide PC market in Q1. That's according to Gartner and Max make up about five percent of Intel's revenue. So it's big. It alone is not going to shift the market. But if the experiment succeeds, the real impact could be if other PC vendors follow. If they look at what Apple's doing and say, yeah, it's working pretty well. I bet we could benefit from that, too. High performance with better battery life is one of the big promises of this approach. That will take time, though. We won't see the first Apple Silicon based devices until the end of this year. And that transition is going to take two years. So we won't really know the answer of whether this had a big impact on the wider PC vendors until 2022 at the earliest. Keep in mind, too, that Chrome OS and Windows already support ARM and there are devices like the Surface Pro X available. So it may or may not shift PCs to ARM, but it will have an impact. And Intel is already fighting with AMD in the consumer space, though Intel holds its own in the enterprise. Intel saw a 14 percent year over year rise in its client computing group. So they're still getting companies to buy the machines that have Intel inside. But on the consumer space, that's where Apple is strong. That's where Chromebooks are strong. Chromebooks getting stronger in educational marketplaces as well. So maybe making some moves into the enterprise. But Intel is pretty strong in client services. Intel has also been making a lot of its money off data center sales. And while there is an ARM presence in data centers, Intel's April earnings report showed a 43 percent year over year rise in sales in that sector. So Intel doing very well there. Where does that leave us? The consumer space is going to be a brawl with ARM based laptops from Apple, Windows and Chrome fighting it out with AMD and Intel on the x86 instruction set that may spill over into enterprise. If Apple succeeds, you might see in a couple of years more enterprises deciding to go Apple on ARM because of the battery life benefits. You might see the Surface Pro X start to deploy and maybe spawn more Windows machines. You might see Chrome making inroads there. Intel is still strongest, however, in the data center. ARM's power savings are becoming more interesting there. And the fact that the world's top supercomputer runs on ARM chips will help improve that perception. But Intel has a nice big lead there. Where Intel's advantage is, is to keep shifting towards what it calls data centric businesses. That includes Internet of Things. Intel's strategy is to embrace growing sectors like that, where high costs of R&D are a barrier to smaller companies. And Intel has enough cash that they can just outspend and get an advantage. So far, that IoT advantage has not materialized, but they've got some time and space to do that. So, yes, it's a big deal that Apple is switching to ARM, but the effect in the marketplace in general and certainly the effect on Intel at this point is still fairly limited, I think. Limited for sure. It's not going to change overnight. And that's what we're that's the trend that might be concerning for Intel. You mentioned AMD. You mentioned data centers starting to use ARM a little bit more. There's also the Surface Neo and more to the point. Windows 10X, which is being developed for the Neo, but will also potentially be usable on, well, they've announced it's going to be usable on other devices, which could be a better version of Windows on ARM devices, even if the current version also runs to an extent. Overall, it is a confluence of things that might spell uncertainty for Intel on the, I don't know, I guess, five year term. Intel is aware, though. They have mentioned a year ago, a few months ago, a year ago. They have made a big mere culpa. They've said they didn't focus on the right things and that they are writing the ship. So they still have time to make it right. As you said, it doesn't mean Intel is over now, but it is another indication that they need to take things a little bit more seriously than they have in the past 10 years, I'd say. Yeah, I look at it and say, Intel's got time. They need to not blow that time that they have. And because they've had time, they knew this was coming and they've gone through a series of CEOs that have each said, this is where we're going to point our resources and look for the win. And that win hasn't come. They were going to compete on mobile. Remember the Atom processor? And that didn't work for them. Right now, they're trying an IoT. It's not catching on. They need a new win because, eventually, ARM is going to come for the data center. I think that that is clear. And they may not capture the data center from Intel, but it's going to be a problem for them. And they need another space to move into. By the way, an episode of Know a Little More about what ARM actually is, it's an instruction set and an architecture, but it's not a company that makes things. If you're like, wait a minute, that's confusing. How does that even compete with Intel? Check that out coming this Thursday in the Know a Little More feed. Or if you're a patron of DTNS, you've got that episode of Know a Little More in your Patreon RSS feed right now. Excellent. That's good to be a patron. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, ARM stories, Intel stories and lots of other stories show up there every day. You can submit your own and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Sean wrote in and said, not sure if I missed it in coverage anywhere, but how will native ARM macOS apps be handled? Still user downloadable or forced into the app store with universal two Intel apps also still installable. If user installed, how does this build for Apple not allowing side loaded apps in iOS if iOS native works on macOS and all of the new app store issues with Apple requiring app store and the 30 percent cut, et cetera. Seems like companies like Epic with wanting to side load Fortnite would have a lot more to use against Apple in courts. Yeah. My answer is Apple hasn't said, but I don't know that you need to jump to the conclusion that they're going to change things. What Apple has said is you can compile an app to run on Intel or ARM as universal to you can run your Intel apps, whether they be for Intel or in a browser or just in time on ARM using Rosetta to they're even making Linux and Docker virtualization for their ARM laptops and iOS and iPadOS run natively. They didn't change any procedures, although they didn't have the app store when they switched to Intel previously. I would imagine we would be hearing about it very loudly from developers if there was a new restriction that said you had to be on the Mac app store if you want to run on ARM. They have not said anything that indicates that. So I get it, Sean, if you're paranoid, you may say, ah, but they haven't said they won't. But usually you don't say you won't do everything because you won't do it and you want to spend your time talking about what you do want to do. And that's Apple hasn't said they're going to do anything that would cause that to be the case. So at this point, without any further clarification, I would not expect Apple to change the policy that says if you go through the Mac OS app store, then of course you'll be able to run easily, but there are permissions that will allow you to take apps off the general web as well. But we'll keep an eye and find out if there's any difference. Thanks for the email, Sean, and also thanks to, and a shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Ali and Lisa Shunjabi, John Atwood, and Chris Benito. Also thanks to Patrick Beja for being with us today, tonight in your world. What's been going on since we saw you last? Oh, so many things, I guess I would recommend. Sorry, I just saw Sarah trying to turn on her light. It's motion sensor lights in here. I'm like clearly I'm not animated up on the show. Nobody on the audio podcast saw it, so we'll have to explain it now. So a lot of things have been going on. I would recommend you go check out Work in Sanity, which is a podcast I do with Juan Tom Merritt, who, and where we talk about having to work from home and how to keep your sanity doing that. I also would recommend The Phileas Club, which is a show where I talk about news from around the world. And in the past month, in the past few weeks, we've talked to a number of black people who've told us how they live their lives in both the US and in France. You can get that too at francspin.com. Excellent, yeah, both those shows were really edifying, I would say, really good at exposing you to another perspective that you may not have. Check those out. You can always support our show at any level at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon and go get a mask in our store at dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You got something on your mind? Well, we'd love to read it. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, which is 20 30 UTC and you can find out more, tell a friend, dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.


We'll go ahead and continue and resume the discussions that we've been having on practical spirituality. So we'll just do a quick overview of the topic for today and then Insha'Allah we'll go ahead and get into it. So we're going to be covering today the detailed ways of following the sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in a variety of daily actions. So you have different types of sunnahs of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. You have sunnahs in acts of worship, right? So for example, praying to Raqqa after Lohar. Those are known as two sunnah Raqqas that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam would regularly pray after Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And there are a variety of different other sunnah actions that one might do. Somebody decides to fast on Mondays or fast on Thursdays. That would be an example of following the sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam with regards to worship, with regards to not obligatory fasting but additional and optional fasting. But the more you do it, the more you are in alignment in accordance with the sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, the more you are in alignment with what he would do. Then you get into the sunnahs of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in actions. And these are very, very important because the majority of your day, the majority of our days we don't spend in worship. The majority of our days we spend doing just various types of actions, various types of deeds. And so what's mentioned here now in the book that we've been covering by Imam al-Hadad, the book of assistance, he says that it's important to adhere to the manners of the sunnah and the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam if you want to perfect your following of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Now the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said in the hadith that none of you truly believes, none of you attains true belief until his or her desires are in accordance with what I've brought. That's when you attain a state of true belief, not just when you outwardly express belief. No, that is Islam. And you say, Ashadu walla illa Allah, Ashadu walla illa Allah, that is the first level of submission. But then there's degrees of that. There's degrees with what's called Islam and then iman and then what's called ihsan. And belief is iman. Belief is so somebody could say, yes, I accept the fact that Allah exists and I accept these things. But how strong is your belief? That's only Allah knows how strong someone's belief is. Many times he tests us in our life and we ask Allah to make our tests easy and protect us from difficult tribulations. But he tests us in order to measure our belief. Now there are various ways to increase beliefs, various ways to increase belief. We've been talking about the first topic that we discussed in this class was about yakin, was about spiritual certainty and attaining the state of yakin. And that's very much linked to iman and belief. Now somebody will increase their belief the more virtuous actions that they do. That's one way of increasing belief. The more that you study and the more that you learn about Allah and you reflect, as we've spoken about before, reflection, that's one way of increasing belief. One of the best ways to actually increase your belief is to follow the sunnah of Allah. Without you even realizing there will be lights that you're getting. You're depositing spiritual lights into your bank account, into your spiritual bank account by means of which your iman is increasing and your belief is increasing. And so that is what we're going to be talking about today, inshallah. So in order for somebody to attain the highest levels in this religion, the highest stations in this religion, what's called a siddiqi, the station of siddiqi. We know Abu Bakr is known as Abu Bakr Siddiqi, the truthful, the most truthful saint. That is what a siddiqi is. In order for somebody to attain that state of complete truthfulness in their sainthood, there's no way for somebody to attain that state, as Imam al-Haddad mentioned, without following the sunnah of the Prophet's sallam. The Prophet's sallam is the door. You cannot attain in this religion without the messenger of Allah sallam. He is the door. He is the door to Allah. He is the one who taught us this religion. If he hadn't told us, we wouldn't know about God. We wouldn't know about the Quran. We wouldn't know about the afterlife. He is the door. So what he did in his day, he didn't do anything except that there was a wisdom to it. Every action that he did, every step that he took, everything he did when he woke from the time that he sallam awoke in the morning. To the time that he went to bed, to the actions in between, everything is noted down in the sunnah. You won't find a man more transparent than him in history. Nobody has as much recorded about them with as much verified authenticity as the Prophet sallam. And it's a remarkable miracle of this religion that we know this much. We know down to the intimate details about his life. Literally even how he was in intimate moments. We know that many details because nothing was left unsaid about the Prophet sallam. And of course there's a whole other reality in realm than Prophet sallam that only Allah knows. But we at least know the outward actions. What he was inwardly experiencing as inward states. Subhanallah. Only Allah is truly aware of that. But that's where following the Prophet sallam becomes so important. And following him in every action. So that's the kind of context for what we're about to talk about. And so now he mentions that before you do anything in life. Somebody wants to attain this state. There's like different aspirations and him that people have. Some people might be like, yeah, I'm good with like just the basics. I'm good. I don't really need to do anymore. Some people are like, no, no, no. I'm ambitious. I'm a go-getter. I want to get anything I do in my life. I want to be the absolute best, especially in my religion. Someone might say that. And so if they want to do that, you follow the absolute best. Then you follow the greatest of Allah's messengers. And you follow the greatest example, which is the Prophet sallam. And so he says before you habituate yourself to any behavior in life, examine to see if the messenger sallallahu alayhi wa sallam did it. Did he sallallahu alayhi wa sallam do that behavior? If he did that behavior, how did he do it? And then try to work on getting yourself on that path. And so now he's going to go through everything from eating and drinking, sleeping, waking up, using the restroom, putting on your clothing. He's going to go through all the different actions that the Prophet sallam would do. A couple of things to just mention before we get into this. These might seem like minor things in the time we live in, right? Someone might be like, that doesn't sound very spiritual. There's just a basic dua. That's just like, what's the big deal, right? And that doesn't really like, what's the big deal if I say that or not? Right? As long as I believe. This is where we have to really, really make sure that we don't let satanic insinuations and whispers get into our hearts and our minds. Because shaitan knows the treasures of this religion. He knows the treasures that we have. He knows about them. And he wants to prevent us from attaining them. So he will try to come to us and try to make things that are big in the sight of Allah, make seem small to us. They call this not really that big of a deal. And that's where we have to be really, really careful.  Every sonnah of his is a big deal. And of course, the most critical of those being the sonnahs in relation to worship. But as we mentioned, we're not worshiping all the time, but you can, as we mentioned earlier in the classes, that make through intention, everything can become worship. That's the amazing thing. Everything can become something that is good for you. That's good for us in our, in our Dean. And so then we get into, into this, right? So the first step is practically every activity that you do, everything you're about to engage in. Like, okay, is this something that is permissible to do or not? If it's not permissible to do, there's obviously not going to be a sonnah associated with it. The sonnah is to not do it, right? And then if it is permissible to do, okay, did the Messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam do this? If he did do it, how did he do it? That was the three steps someone asked. Kind of mentally make a note of that. And you say, okay, as I go about anything in my life, did the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam do this? If, or sorry, is it permissible? If it's permissible, did the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam do it? If he sallallahu alayhi wa sallam did it, then how did he do it? What was there a specific way that he did it? There might be, let's say you're about to eat food. We know how the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam ate food. He would sit on the ground. He would have a very specific position that he would be leaning in. He would actually eat with three fingers. And he would not eat until he was stuffed. He would not eat until he was full. He would eat just a little bit. And then he said, if you have to, if you eat until one third food and one third water and one third for air and thicker, leave one third for that, if you have to. But you don't need to eat that much. So when we say, okay, well, once we eat our fill, that's not actually following the sunnah, right? That would actually be against the sunnah, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And we have to see that as, okay, I'm slipping from the sunnah. Not like, oh, that's not related, because everything he did was linked with the deen. There was nothing that he did. He did not speak from his hawa, hawa, his desire, as Allah says in the Quran about the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Everything he did was given to him and taught, taught. Because he is the example for all of humanity. If everybody in humanity tries to follow his example, humanity would be in a really, really good state. The more we are distant from the Messenger sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, the more that we are then ultimately distant from what Allah wants for us, right? So that would be kind of an example. So now we're going to go through the various daily kind of activities. But does anybody have, before I get into that, does anybody have any questions at all about what we discussed so far? Online anything? Okay. Okay, cool. So the first one is, he says, when you begin the day and you put on your clothing, begin the day and you put on your clothing, right? This is the way in which you follow the Son of Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam in order to do so. Now if somebody does this, and what's going to happen, what's happening in the unseen, keep in mind. Everything that's happening in the scene has an unseen reality. The believer is in touch in some way, shape or form with the unseen reality. Islam is not a religion of outward movements and actions. That's not the point of the religion. And anybody who thinks that's what it is, they miss the mark by a long shot. There's always a deeper wisdom to everything you do. It's not just like I move around, I do some rukus and then it's like, no, no, no, no, there's a hue there. But it's, do we think? Do we understand as Allah says in Quran? And this is usually when people like really get deep into religion, and sometimes they get really, really like harsh and mean and angry. It's because they missed the boat and missed the mark on what the inner meanings of the religion is. Because the whole point of the religion is mercy and kindness and gentleness, especially amongst the believers, right, that the Muslims are, adillatun ala al-mu'mineen, adizatun ala kafideen. That they're gentle with the believers, right?  And then they just start yelling at everybody and getting angry with people. It's because the mark has been missed. The mark has been missed. So that's where the unseen realities become very important to tap into and to understand. Yes. You just mentioned it. You've heard that there's the seen and the unseen are like two sides of a coin. They're both there, but they're seen to exterior, but they're interior. So you might want to mention that it's all still one. It's all right there. But they say it's like two sides of a coin. Right. Adizat ala kafideen. So as was mentioned, that it's like the seen and the unseen are like two sides of a coin. You and I might see one side of the coin. We don't know the other side, but it does exist. Just because you don't, you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This is the very weak argument of the atheists. It's just because you don't see it. It doesn't exist. Well, before, before life, when you were in the womb, you couldn't see the world and no idea of the world. You just, you're comfortable swimming around in the womb. Everything is good. And then all of a sudden, boom, world crying and this whole expansive space, you didn't see it. Right.  And it's like, oh, yeah, there's this whole place I've heard about. It's called the world. And there's this someone called the mom and like mom is feeding us and sustaining us right now. And like, you know, we're just like absorbing sound and the atheist baby would just be like, look at this guy's on one. He's crazy. He thinks there's a place called the world. He thinks we're going to leave this place. This is it. This is all our life is we're just here to swim around. That is the limitation of the atheist mind in the time you live in. But the believer we believe so when the baby of ultimately is born, right? They're like, oh, there is a world and there was a mom and it was all real. Right. Similarly, the believer you and I are just in this dunya. It's a very, very small place. It is as the womb of the mother is to the rest of the world is like this dunya is to the, to the, to the hereafter. The hereafter is way bigger, way bigger, way more expensive.  Right. And so there will be some people like, oh, I don't believe in that. I have no idea about what we know because who's a Sadik al-Amin Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi sallam told us about this. So because we believe him and then the more someone gets in touch with their spirituality, the more now they have access to the unseen. They will actually start to experience these things. And some people have dreams and a village just a connection to the unseen. And might not, might not exist. That's not a mandatory thing, but it does happen. The more yakeen increases and it proved in the Quran that the people of Haqq al-yakeen of the knowledge of certain of the truth of certainty. They can attain this. And Allah says in the Quran that he showed Ibrahim al-Islam the Malakut of the Samawati Al-Ark. The spiritual domains and realms of the heavens and the earth. He showed Ibrahim al-Islam this. Right. And we know that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam had access to many things. But amongst what he told us was the Isra'a al-Meraj was the heavenly ascension. So he believed in it. He had experienced it with Ibrahim al-Islam. And then he literally went to heaven physically and spiritually and saw it and he came back and told us. And so we believe him. And the more somebody follows him, this is the important part. The more someone follows him in what's called the mundane activities, the stronger their spiritual beliefs get. As long as they're linking these things to Iman and the intention is there. That's the way the lights work. The spiritual lights will work. The noon. So the first part is when somebody puts on clothing. So when someone puts on clothing, the sunnah is that you put on the right sleeves first and you take them on last. You put on the right sleeve first and you take the right sleeves off at the end. And that somebody should... There is a dua when wearing clothing. Alhamdulillah al-Ladhi kassani hadat auba. That you are praising Allah for the clothing that you have. Wa-razaqani mughadi hawli minni wa-laqua. Then you are basically... Without Allah, you couldn't have this clothing. In the time we live in, we, like Alhamdulillah, have a lot of clothes. A lot of clothes. Like walk-in closet at her biggest apartment sometimes. A lot of clothing. But especially in earlier times, like having a handful of garments was a huge deal. Because every single piece of clothing was like hard work from an animal that somebody had, right? And that somebody had to make it. It was fairly expensive to do. And so they felt the gratitude for the clothing. And there were quite a lot of people who didn't have enough to cover themselves. Or especially cover themselves in the wintertime when it was cold. And so there's... Now we need to re-feel that heartfelt gratitude. It's not just about repeating the dua like a parrot. It's not the goal. Just... No, no, no, no. It's about feeling Alhamdulillah that Allah gave me clothing. When you say Alhamdulillah and you're putting it on that Allah gave me something to cover myself with. And without him I wouldn't be able to do so. And when you really like it's like a cold winter day and we're approaching... We're in winter now. It doesn't get too cold here Alhamdulillah. But when it does and you feel like Alhamdulillah that I have this jacket. Or these gloves or this beanie or whatever it is. You really feel the shukr. And then when the nafs, the ego inside is about to complain about something. The good part in you and us will remind the ego. Why are you complaining? Alhamdulillah you have clothing. You say Alhamdulillah for clothing every morning. And so now it kicks in. The effect of the sunnah kicks in. Right? Because you follow the sunnah. So this is one of the sunnah dua in the link that we had given. I think maybe a month ago. All these dua that we're going to be talking through today are all in that link. That's tiny. I think it's tinyurl.com slash awrad. Awrad awrad. Awrad awrad. And there's a whole section in there about sunnah dua's for people to read for every action. So we're talking through some of them right now. Not every single one. And then there's also dua's. Somebody says when they take off their clothing. Dua's bismillah. Bismillah. Al-ladi, la ilaha illa huwa. Again, you're just reminding yourself of Allah. Many of these dua's, you'll see there's great gratitude to Allah. Or you're somehow weaving in la ilaha illa.  You'll see in a lot of dua's we're about to talk about. Because you're just relating everything. So now the believer, the morning they're doing this, when they wake up they have a dua. And they use the restroom to the dua. And they finish this. Always dua's, dua's. And they're just, you're going to attain a state of ultimate presence. Of being always aware of God. And that is the ultimate goal. Yes. Can you please tell us what you just said? Bismillah, al-ladi, la ilaha illa huwa. That in the name of Allah, there is no God except He. So I just want to ask that some of these la ilaha neighbors fight it. The God is once within Qasad. Qasad? Yeah. So the neighbor just came in and wanted me to ask. There's a black Volkswagen Passat blocking the driveway of the neighbor. So if anybody has that car, if you could just kindly move it. Sometimes at night time it's hard to see where the driveway starts and where it ends. When he has a black Volkswagen, please try to move it. Honoring our neighbors is a very important part of our deed. So thank you. I don't know if anybody's here. Yeah. Just let him or her know that we've announced it. And so if it is anybody's that they will move it. And that we're sorry about that. Someone asked, where is this class taking away? We're in Oakland, Oakland, California. Lighthouse. Okay. So there is. So then there's the intention with the clothing that somebody makes the intention that y'all I'm putting on these clothes in order to cover up. Right. What you have asked me to cover up in order to cover up my, my odor, my nakedness in order, in order to be grateful to you. Right. That you make, you make a 10, whatever other intention somebody wants to make, but at minimum those intentions. And then somebody is also mindful at that point of what they're doing. If someone's not covering up. And when they make the intention, like, oh, wait, hold on, I'm not actually being truthful of my intention. Right. You're not going to really make a door to put on clothing. If the clothing is probably not the most appropriate. Right. And so you start to be mindful of that. And then the mindfulness kicks in and the benefits start to come out. Inshallah. So that would be, that's like the first step. Right. With regards to clothing and there's a whole process. Again, somebody could go dive deeper. You start with your right, your right. And when you take your clothing off, you start with the left. And then you say that. And when somebody does this, it also prevents the Shia teen and the gin, as we talked about a couple of classes ago, that there's unseen forces that are trying to get in your life. And if somebody doesn't make the laws before they eat or before they put on clothing and so on and so forth, they open themselves up to the unseen forces. And these are very, very, very, very real. The darker of a place that somebody's in, the more bad unseen forces there are. The more bad unseen forces there are. And the more newer that somebody has in a place, the good unseen forces. It's the good unseen, of course, the angels and the other good spirits will exist in that place. Right. And so somebody can make their home a place of immense goodness and make their own body a place of immense goodness by following the Sunnah. So then he gets into the next, the next is with regards to, to speaking. And so he says, when you speak, right, speak words of goodness. Otherwise, don't speak much. Don't speak unless it's words of goodness.  Right. That's not the way of the believer. It's not the way of the Prophet's. Generally speaking, didn't speak that much. Smiles a lot. And he was German. Salah. But when he did speak, it was beautiful speech. And of course, every single word of his, we have a millenia, every word, but yeah, I mean we have a lot of the blessed words of the Prophet. And so that is when you, when somebody's speaking, right? So he's, we're going about like various things someone does through the day. And they're not in any particular order. But like when somebody starts their day, somebody puts on a clothing, when someone speaks, and what, what are the things that they're, are they, you know, should they do? There's three aspects to speaking that we should all have down. First is according to the Son of the Prophet, to speak in an eloquent and structured way. That's from the Son of the Prophet. To not be all over the place in someone's speech, right? To not just like say a bunch of words really, really, really, really quickly that don't make a lot of sense. No, to be structured in the speech, right? And to be methodical and clear. It's from the Son of the Prophet that he was clear in his speech. He was given clear speech. So this is part of our deen. It's part of our deen to be clear. It's part of our deen to be eloquent. It's part of our deen to have good grammar and good rhetoric. It's part of our religion. It's a core part of our religion, in fact. It's not part of our religion to, like, not if somebody speaks a certain language. Of course, there's time when they're learning the language, but if that's the dominant language that they're speaking, they're talking regularly, it's important to learn the grammar. To make sure that someone's not, like, saying sentences that don't really make sense to the people who are listening, right? Because it affects the, it impacts the effectiveness of the words, right? And so the second thing in speech that's important is that you never make people feel bad when you're in the conversation with them. You always avoid anything that this person could, could I say something that might make this person feel off? Right? So what's an example of this? That if somebody says something, they're like, oh, I gotta tell you about this, this one time that this thing happened. They're about to tell you a story that you've already heard three times. You don't say, you already told me that. You just say, oh, yeah, tell me. Right? Because they might have forgot. That's from the Son of the Apostles. That somebody will not make somebody feel bad in their speech. They won't, they won't, they won't, they won't turn them down. Right? As long as it's something permissible, if it's something impermissible, they'll gently be like, hey, we should probably not talk about that, right? If you know, they're about to say like backbite somebody or something. But otherwise, that it's not from the Son of the Apostles to shut people down or to make them feel bad while you are speaking or while they're speaking. And the third category, which is really important in our times and it's from a core aspect of the Son of the Apostles and daily speech is to mine our own business. Lost some of our time. Proposal Son told us that this is an important trait of the believer that they don't get involved in things that are not their own business. So how does this usually happen?  Oh, did you hear what? Hear what? It has nothing to do with us. Right? Oh, you know that thing that so-and-so that this celebrity did or this person did? Who cares? It's not my business. Why? Why do I need to get involved? Right? So at the age of social media, this has become everybody wants to kind of be all up in each other's business, but that's not from our thumbnail. We limit what we need to limit to ourselves, our family members, core members of our Spreng Circle. We do not get involved. And we, if somebody starts to tell, is about to tell us about something that's not our own business, we just say, hey, I'm actually like, you know, just not really trying to, trying to hear that. I got my own issues to focus on right now. You can kind of gently find ways to prevent them from getting, getting, especially gossip started, right? But in general, minding our own business, not get involved in other people's lives to the degree that it's not our business. Right? And same thing about talking about other people. A lot of people love to talk about like, oh, this people, this person, especially people who are religious, have religious practice. They love talking about all who don't do things in a certain religious way. It's not your business. Unless you're in a position of scholarship or in a position of Dawa, it's not your business. It would be better for you and me to just focus on our own selves, especially if we're people who struggle to do basic things like wake up for pleasure. We have no business speaking about other people. Absolutely none. Right? Zero. Right? But if we do so, it's a, it's a major weakness. We like to talk about other people. Oh, this person did this. This person at the masjid, this person, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And it's on and on and on and on and on. And we don't focus enough on our own selves and our own self-improvement that we have to do. So those are the three, right? To speak in a structured way, to not make people feel bad and to mind our own business from the sunnah of the messenger of Allah, sallallahu alayhi sallam, in his speech that are, that are like the kind of three components. And then the, the two ones that are, that are, that are generally applicable, right? In speech and writing and all the things is to speak words of goodness and to stay away from some, from lewd words. Right? So when we, when we speak, we should be not be speaking about lewd things. As I mentioned, profane language, so on and so forth. The amount of cursing that goes on in our times now is you just, you wouldn't see that in the Sahaba and in the Prophet's Son. It wouldn't happen. They would, it's, it was all goodness. Like, and there were people who before that were all bad. Like Jaheliyah was a really bad time. Many of them were straight up, like some of the worst people that existed in their society. Very, very bad people, right? Bad with regards to their violence, bad with regards to the way that they treated each other, bad with regards to the way that they are treated women, all these things. It was the period of ignorance, right? Cursing each other, so on and so forth. And then messenger of Allah, through his radiant presence and through the guidance that Allah brought through him, completely transformed them in like two decades. Absolutely amazing. To be the best people on the face of the earth. After the prophets, there's no generation better than the Sahaba. Nobody. And that wasn't his impact, but speech has a lot to do with it. The tongue is very, very, very powerful. Every word you say, and as Imam Ghazali mentions, every word that somebody says directly impacts their heart. And there's a little image of that impact when it's negative drawn on the heart or when it's positive drawn on the heart. You literally have an unseen imprint drawn on the heart. So when someone is like cursing all the time and yelling at people all the time, and is angry all the time, boom, boom, the heart is getting dirtier and dirtier and darker and darker and darker. And those images are being drawn. And the more someone's talking about lewd things and profane things and inappropriate, the more and more it happens. You'll generally see people of purity that have a shyness to not talk about. You'll see a difference change in their face when someone starts to tell like a vastly inappropriate joke. Such thing, I don't really want to hear it because they know it's going to affect their heart. The same goes actually for listening. That's not the topic for today. Anything someone listens to that's profane impacts the heart immediately. So it would be very, very conscious of when we listen to people what type of things that they're saying, backbiting, something like that. The same thing with music, very, very careful that the lyrics lead to a negative impact for sure on the heart. And when somebody is listening to positivity and listening to goodness, that will leave a good impact on the heart. So those are the sunnas of, some of the sunnas, of course, we didn't get all of them. Those are the sunnas of, some of the sunnas of speech. Does anybody have any questions on this before we go to the next category? Yeah. Where you might want to mention, you did mention that they're having a very short time. Unless you have something important to say, say nothing, let that be their default. Right. So the sun told us and so on and so on that along the lines of to speak, speak good or stay silent or remain silent. Right. Don't just talk for the sake of talking and definitely don't talk for the sake of talking bad or saying negative things. But speak, speak good or to remain silent. Right. And so it's very, very important. Thank you for writing this out from that. Anybody have any other questions with regards to the sunnas of speech? Yes.  So how do you kind of balance that, you know, if you see certain things going on in the world or someone doing something wrong? Yeah, that's a good question. So that would be part of, so the question was when you see something going on that's wrong, like an injustice. How do you balance that? Right. How do you, so that is, that is actually a part of the sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to speak justly as well. Right. And to rectify society. That was so now, so the thing to evaluate there's a couple of things to value. First is, is it somebody's position? Right. To, to, to impact that. Right. Like, okay, if I speak out about this, will I be able to do something about it? If so, for sure, somebody should speak out about it. That it's a courageous thing that is from the righteous, from the people of righteousness to speak out about that. Or better to stop it, to stop it, right? To actually stop the injustice. If you see somebody on the street getting hurt or a woman getting assaulted, you better stop it. You can't be like, no, no, no, I don't know. I don't know. No, no, no, 100%. You have to stop it. You are required to stop it. Right. If somebody sees somebody getting unjustly. Now, now this is where you're going to be discerning. If someone sees someone getting like unjustly spoken at. Right. You don't go back at them and curse them out. Right. Like just because they're cussing somebody out, you don't be like, actually, no, it's you and start defending that person in a lewd way. But there's of course a way that you can get involved. That would be in line with the sunnah of the prophet, so some of them where somebody can go and help. And all of the sunnah has principles. And one of the main principles of this. One of the main principles of our, of our Dean in regards to this is you want to try and help other people. You want to try to be a person of benefit. Right. But then there's things with regards to like, let's say somebody just wants to vent and rant. I'm just going to post a really long status about how I believe that this is unjust, but it's really just, I just want to kind of do it for the sake of my ego. Just so other people can like it. You have to know why you're doing something. If you can impact change, Bismillah for sure, somebody should do it. If somebody is just like, I just want to rant about something. I mean, I don't think there's probably nothing wrong about it. It's a waste of words. Remember every word is getting written down by one of these angels, every word, right? So it's probably not the best use of, use of time, but that's different than somebody going and now an unjust way, stopping an injustice. You don't want to be amongst the people who's doing that, right?  Right. Does that, does that make sense? And does that help? Does that answer the question? Yes. Right. Right. Right. And the Muslim doesn't, should do, does their absolute best to be a person who is a person of sugar and not a person of, of, of ingratitude and complaining generally fall into gratitude. Right. So if somebody has like, I want to stop something going on in society. That's wrong. For sure. But like just moping about it, probably not a good use of anybody's time. And eventually even the people who are listening will stop listening because it's not, not a good use, but yes, we should be people who are out there and active and doing these types of things, but we need to be grounded in our approach. Right.  You won't, you will not affect change if you're not doing it in the, in the line, you generally will not, you will not, not do it. If you look at the way even of one of the, one of the most powerful and the most impressive people in our, in our tradition in the last 100 years, Malcolm X, look at the, look at his rhetoric, look at his elocution, look at the way in which he brought about change. Right. It was very, very, very, very, very well done. Somebody just has to monitor and watch that and study that in order to kind of understand some of those, those ways and from a, from a social activism point of view. Does that, does that answer it? Yeah. Okay. So we'll keep moving on then. The category of bad speech, right? We stay away from the most important bad speech to stay away from is backbiting, the most important. And it's the one that it's the, this, can anybody actually give a definition of backbiting? I think it would be, it would be good to, to get a sense. Anybody have a definition of backbiting? Yeah. Yeah. Like backbiting, like gossip, talking smack. Yeah. Talking smack. So does anybody have a definition of that? Like, what does it mean in our religion? The Arabic word that's used as a, what did, what is backbiting? What does it mean to like, from a religious point of view, when you talk bad about somebody? Anybody know? Yeah. Well, someone's not there. When you, it's similar to that. So it's, when you speak about somebody, yes, speak about someone, something that they wouldn't want to hear. They wouldn't want to hear. And they wouldn't like that you said it. If you speak about somebody and you say something that they wouldn't like, not if you lie about them. Many times you'll hear people say, they'll talk smack and be like, oh, you're, no, no, that's the truth. I'm telling the truth. That's not a criteria. It's not a criteria of, oh, I would say to their face. Yeah. This is also common. I would, I'm going to say to their face. It's not backbiting. I'll say it tomorrow to their face. If they were there, they wouldn't like it. They wouldn't like it. So that could be something truthful that is commonly known. Let's say somebody is like overweight. Okay. And someone is like, like basically believe they're not there and they're talking about like, can you believe how much that dude eats? He has to stop eating.  Let's say, right. He probably 99% chance wouldn't like it that you had said that. That would be backbiting. What is the punishment for backbiting? Really severe. Yes.  Exactly. Yeah. So I was not saying in this example, the person's gone. Yeah. It's when somebody's absent and you say something about them that they wouldn't like to hear. Right. But somebody's gone and you say something about them they wouldn't like. And this is not a lot of the things we say. This is also true on text. This is also true on social media. It's also true on Instagram. It's true on DM. It's true on Facebook Messenger. Every single platform can include it. Right. It includes the vast majority of people that we would talk about. So this has to be very, very, the punishment for this in the next life is very severe. And it comes in Hadith that backbiting is worse than multiple acts of adultery. Multiple acts of adultery. Somebody were to commit adultery. Ourselves, God forbid, children, sisters, brothers, family member. People would erupt. But the same people talk smack all day long. All day long. It doesn't matter. Right. Yes. Good question. Good question. Good question. Good question. So the question is, if anybody didn't hear that is if somebody, something happens to someone and someone is discussing that situation with somebody else in order to get advice. in order to get advice. What do you do is it's still considered back fighting. So the general rules that the scholars recommend is you have to mention the minimum amount of things you need to mention that are negative in order to get that advice, right? So if somebody like, let's say, really hurt you and you wanna say like, yeah, like then they hurt me and then they said this and this, I could say they were saying mean things to you, right?  That somebody just might wanna throw in there, right? But if somebody were just presenting the bare minimum amount of information and they needed to get advice, that would be okay if the person you're getting advice from actually like has advice that you think they could get. If they're just also somebody who wants to be like, yeah, tell me more. And then they're just like, oh yeah, let's just like, you know, talk about them, right? That wouldn't be okay. There are conditions in which it is permissible amongst which somebody is going to an authority and like talking about somebody, right? If someone gets hurt, gotta go to the authority, you gotta go to the judge or whoever it is and you have to present the full case. That would be okay. If somebody asks you, another condition in which it is permissible, somebody asks you about somebody to hire and you're an employer and, or sorry, you work with someone before and somebody asks you, hey, should I hire that person? To the degree that again, the minimum amount, you know that person is not a good employee. Actually, they're not the most trustworthy person and they're not the most reliable person, right?  You know, you don't just add in another extra detail. Same thing if somebody asks you about marriage, hey, is this a good brother to marry?  No, no, no, you have to actually say, you have to say it, actually, from what I understood, that person is, I would avoid that person for these three reasons, right? Yes? And then like, but you're not in the position of like, oh, like, is it a job referral or a marriage referral? It's just like, in general, this thing happened. So like, how does, I guess this man seem to deal with those things when it would be beneficial to the public or to the surrounding community to know about the negative things that this person has done and might continue to do? Right, that's a really good question. So the question was if somebody is, has done something negative, how do you balance like telling other people, like I stare clear at this person or this person is in a position where they could have used you or hurt you, but you know, how does that relate to backfiting? So there's a principle in our religion that preventing harm is greater than spreading benefit. Preventing harm is greater than spreading. It's actually the main principle that was used when the massages were closed during COVID because while spreading benefit of praying Salah is important, preventing harm from the entire community getting the pandemic is more important. So if you're preventing harm from somebody who is like going to hurt people verbally or physically or whatever they're going to do, that would likely fall under that. It just again goes with the same requirements where you probably don't broadcast that publicly unless they're publicly endangering people and then you can broadcast it publicly. If they're publicly doing something you can say everybody, stare clear of this dude or this woman, whoever it is, right? But if you know within a certain circle of people that like there's a strong chance that this person will manipulate or do something you can warn them, hey, some incidents have happened with this person one or two, three reasons I would steer clear of them and you can give them that warning. As long as somebody does so without mentioning excessive extra negative traits about them that are of no relation to the actual point you're trying to drive home. That would be considered like totally fine but you just have to be careful that people don't dig so deep of things that are not their business, right? So there might be a couple of people there that's like, oh, tell me more. And it's like, again, the believer minds their own business that they shouldn't be asking if it's not their business, right? And you should just be like, hey, that's really kind of all you need to know. I would just steer clear of that person but you don't have to give like excessive details. Does that make sense? So it's totally okay for somebody to should, we should warn other people about if we know someone's out to get people, harm people, we should warn them. But it's important to protect otherwise the sanctity of the believer. Somebody did something wrong to one person that's not their general state. Nobody needs to go and like perhaps they repented perhaps they've made things okay with that person, right? So we generally shouldn't let go and just like this we're gonna cancel this person completely and ruin their lives, right? The sanctity of human beings is important and for somebody to dig their dignity. Someone protecting that to the degree that's possible, right? But the most important element of this is gossip. We avoid gossip. That's kind of specifically when we're talking about backbiting, one of the main forms where people just wanna, you know, the kind of colloquial parlance very like just, you know, shoot the, they just wanna just talk about people, they just, just for no reason whatsoever. That's what we wanna avoid in the majority of this. Yes. One thing I would say is in a lot of instances instead of seeing somebody specifically you can talk about principles. So you're talking about principles, general principles that you're not backbiting on someone specifically and that you get their messages from. Yeah. It's a clean way of addressing something. Yeah. Of higher virtue if somebody were to have a platform or a wave by which they could say, hey, you know, in general, these types of things like if they come up near you, you should avoid them, right? Like let's say somebody has siblings and you know that there's a couple of people in the family that are just like, they do strange things and nothing like majorly strange like abuse or anything but just like, you know, to what for you would just give a general example without calling out this aunt and uncle so that the kid doesn't completely have the perception of them. You just say, hey, generally people who do A, B and C, we try to avoid this. It's better to avoid because it's not really an alignment with our religion's teachings or just with morality or something. This and they'll be like, oh, like what? And you give me, you know, they're like, tell me what you're talking about then you can, if you can avoid it, it's better.  Somebody asked a question online, how about in your family, if someone's toxic talking about trauma can help but I worry, is that backbiting? No, if you need to warn somebody if you're about toxicity or about a toxic relationship or about people in your family, that would totally be okay and there's nothing wrong with that. Again, as long as someone is not doing so with excessive like extra things that they're adding on that have nothing to do with it, you would be okay. Okay, so then moving on, does anybody have any questions about this? Yes? Yeah, what about when you do the shooting and the fact that people are gonna say, really like people, mention your brother or sister? Yeah, yeah, that's the punishment for it, exactly. So the provisional told us that the one who does backbite, that's like they're eating the dead flesh of their brother or sister, the flesh of their dead brothers is literally in that will, there will be people and we ask a lot of protection when the next light, they will be fed back because of the backbiting, of the person that they were backbiting, of the person they were talking back about, right?  So just, it's important to be careful and I, without getting into too much of a discussion, be also generally careful about how much somebody public just talk smack about even people and public figures. So you just, you don't wanna eat their flesh and some of the people especially, right? You don't wanna eat anybody's flesh but you just also wanna be mindful of that, right? Like we don't need to get into, we know that people are publicly doing wrong things, politicians and so on and so forth. There are quite a lot of negative traits about them but we don't also need to go to an excess where our entire mission is to like, just rant about them all the time on Facebook and just, this is not gonna benefit you, right? You're just gonna be stacking up, talking bad, talking bad, talking bad, right? You just wanna also be mindful of that. Although it's not the same category because somebody has publicly done something wrong. It is, there's certain things that are okay to say. Okay, the next thing is, the next sunnah and I don't think we're gonna finish all of these because my shah-lah of course is a lot, is I think we'll do one more, we'll do two more, shah-lah. So the next sunnah is sunnah of walking, sunnah of walking. So the Prophet ﷺ said when he would walk, he would not walk with a strut and he would not walk arrogantly. He would walk with a mission in mind and he would walk firmly as though he was walking downhill but he would not, he would walk powerfully but he would not also be running in like in a hurry. It would be a very noble walk, sunnah of shah-lah. Very, very noble in the way that he was walking, right? And so somebody in like, in our time, you'd say you don't wanna walk like kind of trying to draw excessive attention to yourself in a very, very arrogant way. That's not the way the believer walks. Not the way the believer carries themselves. It's not the way the believer drives. The believer does not drive with, you know, just really trying to draw attention to their car. Everything, all the windows down, you know, super loud bass, music bumping. It's like kind of just trying to draw attention, trying to draw attention. It's not the way. Stay humility with humility, right? Just gonna get through this topic with Eskay. I'm sorry. It's not how it works. Oh yeah, please go ahead. Yeah.  That's how it works. Not to see a rule of facing. Right. And keep your attention when you're walking. You can walk back up. Right. With the condition of the window. Going to the side. Right. When the publicist someone's walking, it would be focused. He would look straight. And if he was called, they mentioned that he would stop, but he wouldn't turn around. That's the way that he would walk, right? He would stop, but he would not turn around when he was called. But when he's speaking to somebody, so this is now going back to the topic of speaking, he would give their full attention to that. Completely, like full body turn. He wouldn't be like, oh yeah, just a minute. Dude, let's finish this message. Oh yeah, just one minute, I just got to scroll my Instagram and check for like, now these days we're like hanging out with people and we're just like, no, we have very little attention. Every five minutes we're checking our phone and people just become accustomed to it. It's highly, it would be considered a highly, highly rude in traditional societies for somebody to do something like that. To just like ignore people for 30 seconds of a whole conversation. Could you repeat that? Sorry, I had someone like my post, I just needed to check it. That would be considered very strange. So these are the ways now, what happens when somebody starts to do this? You start to make impact in individual people's lives because they start to feel good around you. When people start to feel good around you, you start to, whatever transformation has taken place inside of you, now that transformation starts to take place inside of them. When that happens to multiple people, you now start to change yourself and then you start to change the closest around you and then they become agents of change and now society starts to change. Because Allah says He does not change the condition of a people until they change what's in themselves. When you change what's in yourself, Allah begins to use you to change others around you. And so going back to the idea of affecting change in the world, it has to be linked to the spirituality. For the Muslims especially, it has to be linked. It has to be linked to, this is the absolute best way to go about doing it. And then the third is with regards to, so with regards to walking, to not be in a hurry to walk in kind of a humble way and to walk with direction, but being on a mission. We can apply this now, apply this to driving, which man, I'm always in a hurry, that's why I need to apply that to myself first. We're driving and as we're moving about, we want to try to be graceful people. The Muslim is generally speaking a graceful person. And then the next one we'll cover briefly is with sitting. As the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ when sitting is that he would try his best often to face the qiblah, that he would have be in a reverential state where he would be thinking about Allah, he's always thinking about Allah, but he would be in a state of reverence and try to keep someone's body covered. What does that mean? That someone is not sitting in a way, especially again now most of us, like if you're wearing pants and stuff is gonna be fine, but you're not exposing for the men to odah, you're not exposing let's say like your entire thigh while you're sitting down.  Of course, someone sitting at home with their family, it's a different thing, but when you're talking about public seating, public seating especially. The next sunnah with relation to sitting is somebody that shouldn't fidget much, shouldn't be fidgeting all the time and be restless. That's not from the sunnah. So the Prophet ﷺ is to not be, so we should not be doing the following things, not fidgeting, not being restless, not scratching all the time, not belching all the time, not stretching all the time, not yawning all the time. Try not to do that when you're in people's company. It's kind of considered rude, right? Somebody's like, it's moving everything around and just like, it's not dignified.  And then you just have to be really, have etiquette around people. And so the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would have this etiquette. If a yon comes, somebody, the sunnah is to put their left hand before their mouth and to lightly yon, right? But to not like all up in somebody's face where someone knows what you ate for dinner last night and then that's not the way, right? And then the other sunnah with regards to seating is, this is a really, really good shortcut. Highly advise everybody note this one down, before you rise from your seat, you say SubhanakAllahumma wa bi hamdik Ashadu Allah, ilahe illa anta astaghfiruka wa tukhu ilayk. Whoever does so will be forgiven for what he or she did while they were sitting if they did anything wrong, right? SubhanakAllahumma wa bi hamdik Ashadu Allah, ilahe illa anta wa astaghfiruka wa tukhu ilayk. If you just Google Dua while sitting or before standing up, you'll find this Dua. I don't have the English here and I don't think I'll be able to, it's roughly SubhanakAllahumma wa bi hamdik that's praising Allah. I bear witness that there is no God except you and I seek refuge and I seek your forgiveness and I turn to you in repentance. So you're basically praising Allah, proclaiming his oneness and saying, I'm sorry for whatever I did that was wrong while I was sitting. Anything you did while sitting in shala will be forgiven. But this is a good shortcut.  There's just glued conversations going on. There's bad stuff going on. As long as you say this Dua, everything will be forgiven, inshallah, that was said. SubhanakAllahumma wa bi hamdik wa astaghfiruka wa tukhu ilayk. So the Dua before standing up, sitting everything inshallah is forgiven. So these are the sunnahs, some of the sunnahs that we just covered that the core part, there's three core parts to each of these. The first is someone has an intention that every action that they do is related to worship. The second, there's generally some type of remembrance of Allah before doing the action, right? And the third, many times there's a remembrance of Allah after completing the action. Those are like the kind of three category or the three elements to look out for. And so just as a quick recap, we should try our best to adhere to the sunnah and all of the things that we do. And examine when I'm doing something, is this in accordance with the sunnah? Sorry, first one, is it permissible? If yes, is it in accordance with the sunnah? And if it is, how did he sallallahu alayhi wa sallam do it? And then you go ahead with that action in that case, right? And somebody spends them, and these are just, there's a handful of things that we'll cover. Sleeping, waking up, putting on clothing, using the restroom, getting ready for the day, eating and engaging with people, walking, sitting.  We haven't gotten to all of them yet. He's covering all of them. And this is why this book, this book of assistance that we're going through is meant to be the book of assistance to the one who's trying to get to the absolute closest levels of nearest to Allah. That this deen is not one where you can attain, it's not just like, I wanna have all these spiritual experiences and so on and so forth, we gotta get the basics down. The basics, and it's the really basic, easy stuff that sometimes someone is like, I don't wanna do it. This is the type of stuff like, oh, the fourth grade kids in Islamic school learn these du'as we're going through in school. That someone might be an adult and they're like, why do I have to do this, right? No, this is the way.  And what's one of the best actions? So one of the best actions as the Heesala Salaam told us is that it is done consistently.  And the light of each of those will build and build until someone throughout their whole day, not a single action happens except that they're present with their Lord. That is the goal you wanna get to.  And you know, so you've seen these du'as that it goes from saying la ilaha illa Allah, many times it's saying la ilaha illa anta. There's no God except you because there's a state of witness. Not speaking about Allah now anymore in the third person, grammatically speaking, phonetics point of views, la ilaha illa anta because somebody has attained the state of presence. And they're aware that Allah is all aware.  And that is the state the believer wants to get to. When the believer starts to have moments of that state, those will be the best moments of the believer's life because those are the moments in which complete, you have attained the state of complete vikr. Vikr is remembrance of the heart, remembrance of the spirit, remembrance of the soul, remembrance of the mind, every remembrance of the tongue, every part of you is remembering Allah, not just the tongue. That's why it's not mechanical and be careful to make your religion mechanical. It's the very, very, very basic first grade level is mechanical. There's way, there's degrees and thousands of degrees beyond that. We have to at least get to the few degrees after that where it's not just mechanical emotions, right? And we go beyond that. We are aware of the presence and we follow the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ to assist us in being aware of this presence. And that is the fastest way. It is the best way and it is the way of our deen and it is the way of our teacher and our master and our Prophet ﷺ. Wa sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, wa barakah ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alayhi wa sallam, alhamdulillahi rabbil amin. Bismillah. The consistency of actually the religion and analogy that you can do is you just have a drop, like if you drop water on a rock, if you keep dripping and drop by drop by drop on a rock, it's like an hole in a rock. That's an analogy that's the power of consistency. Right. Right. And if somebody has a rock and someone takes a whole bottle of water and they have a rock and they just dump the whole bottle of water on the rock, they won't do anything. The rock will just get wet. At one time, won't do anything. Consistently, water drops, water drops, water drops, water drops. We don't really see this anymore. We're not really people that in touch with the earth. We're like living in a kind of urban environment, but eventually a dent starts to form and eventually somebody starts to add. There's actually movement and impression that forms on the rock. Right. That is the way of our actions. Small, small, small, small until boom, it bursts. And now opening start to come. Right. One of the names of Allah is al-Fattah, the opener. And he can open for people. Right. He can open for people.  Ya Fattah, Ya Fattah. Oh, opener. Open for me, open for me. Right. And he will open inshallah. He'll open the doors of goodness for you. So we'll take some other questions first. I don't even know the analogy that makes things difficult. We're just going to take another question or two and then we'll get that out yet. So does anybody have any questions in regards to the topic? Questions, questions, comments? Anything in question online? Let me see. What is the name of the book? The name of the book is the book of assistance. By Imam Abdullah ibn al-Alawi al-Haddad. The book of assistance is the name of the book. Yes. Go ahead. So another analogy that's a similar analogy is the analogy of a ant trying to get some food on a rock but it's kind of steep. So the ant is trying to get the food and he falls on it, trying to get the food and he falls on it six to seven times and he finds he makes it and gets the food. Right. So they give that analogy that's an important subject. First of all, first of year is very powerful. Right. And that's also important, right? The first time somebody does something they're not gonna get exactly what they want most of the time. Right. It takes tries and tries and tries just like in our dunya somebody's learning a sport or someone is learning a craft or someone is learning a language or whatever it is it takes some time but eventually somebody gets it. Right. And then that gives them inspiration and motivation to keep going. And so inshallah we ask that Allah give us these abilities and then he give us the ability in the Taufiq to follow the Son of the Prophet ﷺ to be firm on the Son of the Prophet ﷺ to be people who are focused on in every step and every action that we take to be following the footsteps of the Prophet ﷺ. But there's no other questions. We'll go ahead and anything else? I don't know if anybody has any questions that they didn't want to address. Right now just feel free inshallah after Isha just feel free to come find me. Yes. What about slander versus backpack? So slander is considered when you're lying about something. So backbiting is when it's truthful. Right? Right. So backbiting is like somebody is let's say overweight and someone is like mentioning that they're overweight but they're backbiting them because they wouldn't like it that you mentioned that. Slander is if like that's not even a true thing about that person and now you're mentioning it. So that's slander. So slander is worse than backbiting. It's worse than backbiting. Good question. Did you have a question? No, okay. Okay. ähnlich Allah we ask Allah that you allow us to follow it and not the pious, Allah the prophet, Allah, fade left ability to follow them in every action in every inward and outward way. Allah allow us to be people of goodness and the people of Pool of righteousness and the people of nearness to you. Trust andun assemble me. Trust into your nearness, trust into your nearness remove any tribulations that anybody is going through cure those who are sick.  We ask you for everything good that the Messenger ﷺ asked for and we ask you for protection from everything evil that he ﷺ asked for protection from.