A Choice That Changed My Life, A Personal Story | Mufti Abu LAyth

just one choice away from an entire different life you know years ago i started studying arabic years many years ago in my teens and i didn't think of it going in any direction and i didn't think it was ever possible to constructively pursue this path i began to get more and more immersed in my studies and i was it was the only thing in my life at that time i don't have much going for me as you can imagine

at that time this is like in i don't know maybe 96 97 something like that yeah i think 96 and you know i i just thought that this is all i'm gonna do i'm just going to learn arabic and just read yeah and just i'll be able to if i can just understand the quran it's enough i didn't have high goals and even that if you think of it was just the result of one decision i i had gone on umrah with my i must have been 16 and i'd gone with my mom and

it was just me and her and we were with a group and this one day a person came to me and started speaking to me in arabic and and it happened on more than one occasion but especially one occasion in the haram so i was dressed in in that black white kind of scarf and had a thought and this person came and he started speaking arabic and i couldn't naturally i couldn't understand anything so i said look i don't speak arabic i speak urdu i speak english and it was just the person just kind of looked at me like ah okay i um i thought you you'd understand arabic like just this is what i kind of gathered he was saying

and i thought to myself hmm you know what a shame i don't even know basic yes and no love you know at that time i didn't even know now yes or no and i thought maybe when i go back i should just learn so look one choice and then i started to learn and while i was learning i had no aspirations and no high kind of and i didn't think anything was possible and this one time i i watched this video of um sheikh hamza yusuf where he goes to mauritania and he makes he's got the old video cam and he's made this

video called uh and he names it revival of the islamic sciences and he's just there in the tent with his teacher sheikh murabi and with some other people he's just going around recording some by interviewing and and whatever it's a bit like i suppose vlogging for today and i remember i had a job i used to i got myself a job i was working some insurance brokerage and in the morning i was just watching this video clip or not clip i was watching this video

and you know i just felt i want to do that i want to go study and this thought just clung to me and as i went off to work and i just thought i want to do it yeah i want to do it no idea how no idea what what's in the path but that one choice that one day it changed everything in my life everything that was to come i i mean from

anything to whatever i am or to even people that i know today or friends or everything was if not directly indirectly impacted by that one decision that day and it's in all of our lives all of our lives you know so this that is

may allah bless all of our decisions amen and