I nearly cried in Bradford

I was going to do an overall 4 day Yorkshire mission blog, but felt like writing about today. 

It was a very long train journey. From Gatwick to Kings Cross and then all the way to Leeds and then onto Bradford.

It was an interesting story night where I spoke about a very little known but amazing profound scholar Bishr Al Hafi. Usually I pride myself as a very confident speaker enjoying audiences of all types but today I had a little bit of a test. 

I like to conduct icebreaking activities before speaking. I had a couple of questions including what would you do if you had $1 million? This was for the teenagers in the audience. I do This in order to build rapport, get some laughs going and create a bit of atmosphere. But then suddenly one of the uncles, local uncles he put up his hand and said what kind of nonsense questions are these? Why are you asking this? why are you asking questions about magic in the mosque? Talk about Islam, give us guidance what is this?!..

At first myself and the audience thought he was just joking because later I found out that he was a very jovial kind of character but today this came as a huge surprise to us all. I’ll be honest It kind of threw me off and it took me a good 15-20 minutes to get in the flow because I did not expect that at all Subhan’Allah. 

Anyway, I got in the swing of things we spoke about the amazing story of Bishr Al Hafi. The story of Raja Zia Ul Haq and my own story. And then my conclusion as always was to talk about Allah, getting to know him. 

I spoke about why he deserves worship. I mentioned the ayah where Allah says in Surah Hashr: Do not be like those who FORGOT Allah.. then Allah made them forget themselves…

This is a very powerful ayah, but I posed the question to the audience. 

How can you forget something when you don’t even know it?! 

And then began to I talk about why Allah deserves worship giving some examples and I began to tremble ..I became teary eyed and I just loved that moment! This is a very rare moment as those of us who are involved in this work, We do not get moments like this often,  this is a huge incentive for me to continue this kind of work no matter what obstacle come before you! 

Finally it was very heartening to engage with some of the youth, the teenagers who actually came up to me and shared some issues. 

They appreciated the talk and wanted to keep in touch. This is a huge victory. 

This is why I do this work. This is why YC exists! This is why we need to engage with the Muslim youth Alhumdulillah.