How are you able to invest your time instead of wasting it?
  Consider the following example: if a very poor student is studying to graduate high school, and his scores will determine which university he will be enrolled in, given his ambition is to go to medical school, but in order to study medicine, he must have very high scores, in this case he will be able to study medicine while he is living in his family house without any extra expenses, but if he is one degree short of the needed degrees for medical school, he will have to travel to another city to study medicine, and this means spending money on travelling, renting and transportations, which is a loss.
  In our country your scores in high school determine the university you enter starting with the highest scores to enter medical school, then dental school, then pharmacy, then biology then IT then economics and finally law school.
Accordingly, every student during his final year in high school should use his time wisely in order to get high scores.
The top student in Syria was asked by a reporter: “What did you do to become the first student in the country?” He answered: “The minute of the exams never left my mind all year long”.
  Much in the same line, time is the container of your deeds, and after death there are only two results: either paradise or hellfire.
  Hence your destiny after life will be determined according to the way you use your time, so did you seek knowledge? Did you follow the truth and avoid falsehood? Did you know goodness from evil? Did you know Halal (permissible matters) from Haram (impermissible matters)? Did you know Divine orders and bans? Did you know what is allowed and what is forbidden? Did you know what Allah likes you to do and what Allah dislikes you to do?
The way you spend time determines your destiny, so how will you spend your time? 

Man’s value is drawn from the way he uses his time:

 Dear brother, Al Hasan Al Basri defined man like no one ever did, he said: “man is but few days, and every day that passes it will take away part of him, and I have seen people who were stingy in their time more than being stingy on their money”.

  Frankly, your value is drawn from the way you manage your time and the way you spend it.
Study, learn, excel, specialize, reauthor Quran, understand Sunnah, speak out, call to Allah and make room for yourself among the crowds in a religious sessions, so what do you do in life?
  If, Allah forbids, one of you is afflicted with an intractable disease like cirrhosis whose operation will cost 10 millions, he will never hesitate to sell his only and dear house which he bought after 55 years of hard work and after he adorned it with decorations and fancy furniture, will he?
  Why won’t he hesitate?
  This is because deep inside him he is molded to realize that time is more precious than money, and thus he will sell his house in order to live a few more years and he will consider that a good bargain.

Time is the more valuable than money:

 You are molded deep inside to value time more than money.

  Prepare yourself for the following paradox: if a person holds 500 thousand Liras in front of you and burns it till it all turns to dust and you can’t prevent him since he is holding a gun, so what is your judgment of this person? If one million people watched that, what would their judgment be? They would all accuse him of foolishness and insanity. Therefore wasting money is considered an insane act, and since time, as I mentioned earlier is more precious than money, then the one who wastes his time is even more insane.
  It is a waste of time to spend it at parties where there is idle talks, backbiting, calumny and chit chats about food, drink, women, football players, actors and actresses whether the dead or the alive among them.
  The most serious error man might commit is to waste time in nonsense, purposeless talks, dirty jocks, backbiting, calumny and speaking about the vanity of the world like the car models, and believe me if the youth studied as much as they learn about cars, they would have excelled, but they spend their precious time in talking about cars and their qualities and properties like this one is turbo, this is full options and that one is a four wheeler, and in less decent kinds of talks, they talk about women, movies, backbiting, calumny and idle talk.
  The one who wastes his time is more insane than the one who burns the money he owns, because man is only a few days and time is even more previous than gold.

Managing time manifests civilization:

  Dear brother, let me ask the brother who studied economy: What are the top economic resources in the world? They are four: the first one is the natural resources like oil, phosphate, Uranium, gold, diamond, coal and sh3er, the second resource is the people and specialties, for you are in need for a specialist in plants, in air conditioning, in business management and other specialties. Can you establish a profitable company without people? You can’t, thus you need employees, executive directors, deputy manager, accountant manager, sales manager, import manager, advertising manager and sh3er, so you need materials, place, building, commodities, information and people and all that need money so the third resource is money and the fourth resource is time.

  Time makes the most important factor in life, and unfortunately it is wasted by people in the developing countries where there is no value of time at all.
  In advanced countries they put all the needed governmental departments which are needed to construct a building (for example) in one place, so if you need to pay your taxes or to pay for customs clearance, you find both in the same place, and you can find banks, communications, restaurants and other facilities which make the task of businessmen easy.
  But in a developing or backward country, every governmental department is in a place far from the other one and sometimes it is in a different city, and accordingly, man’s time will be wasted in paper work.
  Time is very cheap in the developing countries.
 There is the single-window system now which is a trade facilitation idea, and it means that all needed facilities are in one place and it is like a mole where you can find everything when you go shopping in one place, unlike the old school system of markets, when you have to shop from different places to get your things (which is a waste of time).
Time is very important, and managing time manifests civilization.
  Get organized in your sleeping, in your relation with your family, in your reading time, in your time spent with family and write plans, use a calendar, have your own agenda and write down your list of tasks, for managing your time reflects your faith because you are time and you are only few days and every day that passes will take part of you with it. 

The definitions of managing time:

  Dear brother: one of the definitions of time is the following: It is to do what should be done, in the perfect way it should be done in the time needed.

   It is said that the one who can manage his time is able to manage his life.
  If the possibility of using your entire time wisely is not available then at least use the most of it in useful matters.
Though using every moment of your life wisely is rather impossible, there is still a waste, so what you ought to do is to invest as much as you can of your time.
  If you are traveling from one country to another or from one city to another, take a book with you and read it.
Fill your time with any useful thing.
  Once I visited France, and there is a fast train which travels from north France to South France at the speed of 350 kilometers per hour, and that speed is close to the speed of planes. This train is soundless because it operates by electricity, but what caught my attention, when I traveled in it, is that every passenger was busy either reading, or using their laptops.
  The seats are provided with electric outlets so that one can plug in his laptop, and the train in general is very stable, it is air-conditioned and it has a restaurant.
  Actually I was impressed, because people in those countries spend their time on the train in useful things, while people in our countries spend the time looking out the window and you can see that yourself if you take a train from Damascus to Aleppo, where the five hours are spent by the passengers in looking only.
  Time is precious, and people of the west know how to use their time. 

Managing time indicates civilization and sound faith:

  Dear brother, managing time indicates civilization and sound faith, and it reflects prosperity and success.

 Dear brother, organize your time and divide it to serve all your tasks, write down your plans and keep adjusting and adding to them continuously.
  Time is the most wasted element in developing countries where delays on flights might extend to three whole hours, whereas in the west they mention the departure and arrival times down to minutes.
  Wasting time reflects unconsciousness of the great loss one is in.
  In our countries people sit in front of their houses for hours doing nothing but looking at people, isn’t that a waste of time?
  The great scholar Badr Addeen Al Hasani once passed by people who were playing backgammon and he said: “Glory be to Allah if only we can buy time from those people, we would have done that.” 

Time is the greatest economic revenue:

  Time is the foremost economic resource, however and unlike rain water, we can’t store time because it passes quickly and the time we miss will never be regained or compensated, for time is the most precious thing man owns, it is the container of deeds, knowledge and acts of worship and it’s the real capital of every individual and society.

According to very accurate statistics, the individual in developing countries works only 27 minutes a day (they divide the national income by the population number in order to get the number of working hours), whereas in advanced countries the individual works 8 full hours, so I don’t believe that an Ummah whose individuals work 27 minutes every day will defeat another Ummah whose individuals work 8 hours every day.
  By Allah there are facts about some advanced countries that break the heart. One company for example has 40 thousand workers, and its annual income equals the national income of the biggest Arabic country whose population is 70 million.
Can you imagine that the national income of a country, whose population is 70 million, equals the income of this company whose workers are only 40 thousand; this is a heart breaking fact.
  Time is very precious, it can’t be bought, it is the backbone of life, it is the ground of civilization, it can’t be sold, it can’t be leased, it can’t be borrowed, it can’t be doubled, it can’t be stored and it can’t be manufactured, all we can do about time is just invest it and use it wisely.
  There are people who use their time in doing their jobs and still they can find time to know their Lord, to worship Him and to draw close to Him, and those are the ones who know the value of time because they use every minute of their time wisely. 

Managing time means to invest it in the best of ways:

  Managing time doesn’t aim to change time, to adjust it or to evolve it but it aims at using it effectively and to diminish the loss of using it in useless matters.

  Time passes, yet sometimes you feel that time is passing slowly, while other times you feel like it is passing very fast, a poet described that condition in this line of poetry: 

If you are complaining that nights are long without me
My suffering is that nights flies when you are with me

 When man is in pain, time passes very slowly, but when he is happy time passes fast, but in both cases the time length is the same.
  Accordingly, time is described as follows: time passes according to a constant and specific speed, and the seconds, minutes or hours are the same, time also passes forward according to a delicate system that can’t be stopped, changed, increased or reorganized, time passes regularly without getting ahead or getting lingered behind, time can’t be stored, time can’t be canceled, time can’t be changed and it can’t be bought because it is the a limited resource which is distributed evenly among human beings.

Man’s problem comes from the way he manages time and uses it:

  Though people are given different fortunes and opportunities which are not distributed equally among them in the worldly life, but they all own the same 24 hours every day, whether they are smart, simple-minded, brilliant or lazy, they all own 24 hours a day and 50 weeks a year.

  The top student in the country and the one who failed both own the same 50 weeks every year, but the one who passed with flying colors used his 50 weeks as if they were 200 weeks, whereas the one who failed used them as if they were only 10 weeks.
  Hence, people own the same share of time regardless if they were powerful officials or clerks,rich or poor because the problem doesn’t lie in the time those people have but rather it lies in the way they use and manage this time.
I hope I was able to convince some of you or the majority here to start planning and managing their time, to prioritize their tasks, to organize the time their tasks take and to follow a plan.
  Managing time is indicated in the following Ayah:

﴾ Is he who walks without seeing on his face, more rightly guided, or he who (sees and) walks on a Straight Way (i.e. Islamic Monotheism). ﴿

[Al- Mulk, 33]

 We will carry on in talking about this topic next lecture inshallah.
 Praise be to Allah Lord of worlds.

The scientific topic:

Bees:

 Dear brother, let us move to the scientific topic.
 Allah the Almighty created creatures within which there are endless Divine wonders like bees for example.
Bees are social insects which have an outstanding system:

 

Bees are social insects which follow an outstanding system.

  In the bee society there is a queen, worker bees, females and male bees, cleaner bees to clean the hive, sh3er to buff and polish the walls and there are guards whose mission is to look out and they even have a password and every bee that fails to say that password will be killed, so if you watch a billion bees at day light, you should know that each one of them will dwell in its hive otherwise it will be killed.

  The password is changed from time to time.
  There are bees that are workers whose mission is to refresh the air of the hive’s cells, and they do that by flapping their wings on the entrance of every cell.
  In winter on the other hand, worker bees seal the hive openings to keep the hive warm inside.
There are the maid bees whose mission is to serve the queen and they make the royal jelly especially for her.
Dear brother, there are scout bees whose mission is to find the fields in order to collect nectar from flowers and after they find the suitable field they go back to the other bees and they dance in a special way to give the other bees the direction to that field, how far it is and how rich it is with flowers, all that is said through dancing.
  The bee’s speed is 60 kilometers per hour when it heads towards the field, but when it comes back to the hive carrying the nectars its speed slows down to 30 kilometers per hour. 

Honey is a cure for people:

  In the most advanced trucks they mix the components of construction while the truck is moving.

In Australia, the giant companies take the raw materials on giant ships and they manufacture Aluminum on the ship to be sold (as a final product) in Cyprus.
  Bees also have the same techniques, for the bees usually mark the flowers they collected so that other bees won’t waste time going to those flowers, then upon collecting the nectars they start condensing them finishing (by that) the first stage of making honey on their way back to the hive.
  Talking about bees needs more time.
  If one bee is assigned to make one kilogram of honey, it needs to fly 400 thousand kilometers which equals traveling around the earth 10 times, needless to say that honey is a pharmacy unto itself for it heals man from diseases as we were told by Allah the Almighty in Quran:

﴾ wherein is healing for men ﴿

[An-Nahl, 69]

The useful function of honey

  By Allah dear brother, everything Allah created has two functions, the first one is to be useful to man and the second one guides him to Allah, and while the west excels in the first mission, Muslims excels in the second one and it is rather more beneficial to make use of them both.  Accordingly if we take honey, it has two functions, the first one is ahealing one whereas the second one is to guide people to know Allah after pondering over the bees’ minute system.
  If a mouse enters the hive, the cleaner bees are too small to kill it considering its size and weight, but instead they wrap it with wax.
  If we want to talk about the amazing skills of the bees in building their hive, and if we want to compare it to man’s skills in tiling the ground, usually the manager instructs his workers to do this and that and they won’t be able to come up with the same tiles’ size unless they all use a sample tile in order to cut the sh3er according to it, however the bees build the wax cells in hexagonal shapes and at the end all the cells will be alike to the micron, not to mention that the hexagonal shape is the best shape for storage as it has the lesser space between cells and it has obtuse angles which allows more amount of honey to be stored besides making the honey accessible to bees. The bees start building the wax cells from the outer line of the hive towards the middle and they meet at the center. These skills are beyond man’s abilities. Allah the Almighty says:

﴾But are communities like you. We have neglected nothing in the Book, ﴿

[Al-An’am, 38]

The Quran mentions that the working bee is the female bee:

  Again there are the scout bees, the worker bees, the dancing bees, the queen, queen maid bees, the royal jelly and the males.

The queen put eggs of male and female bees and queens, and the latter are put in a special place where queens “to be” are kept, and the males are kept in a special place, so how would the queen know which is which.
  The males’ function is to fertilize the queen.
  Allah says:

﴾ And your Lord inspired the bee, saying: "Take ﴿

[An-Nahl, 68]

 The Arabic word “Itakhithee” (take) is addressed to the female bee, so how would the prophet PBUH know that the worker bees who make honey are females? Male bees don’t make honey and it is the female’s mission:

﴾And your Lord inspired the bee, saying: "Take you habitations in the mountains ﴿

[An-Nahl, 68]

 Allah the Almighty therefore addresses the female bee which makes the honey, and this is but a scientific inimitability of the Quran.

Pondering over Allah’s creations guides man to the truth:

  By Allah dear brother, if only one reads a book about the bees, his heart will be filled with fear of Allah the Almighty and he might shed tears.

  By Allah the only Deity, if man did that he would fulfill the purpose of creating honey and bees (i.e. Knowing Allah and fearing Him).
  On the other hand, some people eat honey till they are fed up without even noticing the guiding function of honey, and by that they are nullifying the purpose of creating honey and bees.
  This is supported by another Hadith in which the prophet PBUH said upon seeing the new moon: 

((A new moon of benevolence and righteousness)) 

[Sunan Abi Dawood by Qatadah]

 This Hadith indicates the two functions of everything I mentioned earlier: the first function of anything is to be useful to man, and the second function is to guide him to Allah the Almighty.