I was watching Soufia TV this morning on the Satellite. It seems they have a program called “Liqaa’ al-Ahibba” (Meeting the Loved Ones), where they visit different shaykhs.

The one I saw was a meeting with an old Jordanian shaykh from Jerash or its whereabouts. He looked very very old, wore the turban that the Jordanian and Lebanese  scholars usually wear,  and his white beard had some red henna on it.

His name was shaykh Yusef al-Mahmoud al-Utoom. He introduced himself by saying that he was born in the times of the Turkish State (The Ottoman Empire), and that his age was nearing 120 years. He rocked back and forth in order to speak, as if to help him remember the facts of his life, in the way students of ‘ilm rock back and forth when memorizing the Qur’an and other texts.

He said how back then, in his area, there was complete ignorance in the matters of religion, but that since he was very young he wanted to receive an education. He took his parents to the court in Jerash, at around the age of 8 or 10 I think, to demand that he be given an education, and they put him in a public school. (Or something to that effect).

Then at the age of 12, he heard of a Madrasa in Damascus in which shaykh Badr al-Din al-Hasani and shaykh Ali al-Daqqar taught, and he asked his parents to let him go, but they refused. So he ran away from home one night, and WALKED to Damascus. On the way, he was stopped by the French in Dar’a (currently just past the Jordanian-Syrian borders), which was under their control at the time, and they locked him behind bars for 4 days. Then they released him and he continued his journey on foot to Damascus. There he studied in the Madrasa under these great scholars.

He came back to his town in Jordan after many years of study. He said how at a certain point, he realized that he must die, because of His saying Most High: “And every soul shall taste death” and His saying Most High: “You (oh Muhammad) shall die, and they shall die.”

And so he prepared for his death, despite his young age, by preparing for himself his grave and his shroud, and writing a will for his family in which he instructed them on how to pray and worship Allah properly, and how to gain His pleasure.

He also spoke of how, in those long years of his life,  he renovated an old mosque, and built two other ones, and served as an imam for more than thirty years.

His du’a at the end was really beautiful. Here are some of the bits I remember:

“Oh Allah, grant us love of the Qur’an. Oh Allah, grant us much prayer and fasting. Oh Allah, grant us Qiyam al-Layl. Oh Allah, grant us much Dhikr. Oh Allah, give us khushoo’ in our prayers. Oh Allah, give us khushoo’ when reading the Qur’an. Oh Allah, make us always remember death.”

And so on.

And then, after the request to always think about death, he explained to the viewers by saying:

“He who thinks of death two or three times a day- he will die on Iman.”

May Allah seal our lives on Islam, Iman and Ihsan, and end our lives with the Kalima of Truth, the Kalima of : La ilaaha illa Allah, Muhammadun Rasool Allah.

Ameen.