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It's best described through a meme, right? That's where we live in. You know, you see all of those memes of how it started and how it's going.

And some how I was thinking about how it started and how it's going, so many of the ugly phenomenon in our community,

we don't think about the how it started part, we just see the how it's going, and then we mock that part,

and we try to brush it under the rug, institutionally and individually sometimes,

actually when we are the ones that are indicted by the how it's going part. Try to brush it under the rug.

And in order to really work through ugly phenomenon, things that are undesirable in our community,

in our family lives, in our individual lives, it's important to get back to the how it started. Where are we?

And we know Allah talks about khutawata shaytan.

Do not follow the footsteps of shaytan, verily he is a sworn enemy to you.

And so here's what I want to focus on in this khutbah. What is the first of those footsteps?

There is the first khutbah, the first footsteps, because if you step in the first footsteps, then you're likely to go down the trail.

What is the first footsteps of shaytan look like when we face these types of things in our lives?

And so let me give you an example. You read the Hadith about the man who killed 99 people and then killed 100 people.

The Hadith is about the mercy of Allah. He sought Allah's forgiveness. I wonder what his first murder was like.

I wonder what the first, we know what the last one looked like, and the purpose of that Hadith was to speak about redemption and the possibility of the mercy of Allah,

even for a person guilty of that crime. But I wonder what his first killing was like.

That was a lesson that surely there is something that led him the first time to do that and then a door opened for him.

What led him? What was the argument? Was it disputes? When did he first put blood on his hands to where it became normal for him to take another 99?

That wasn't the premise of the Hadith, but that's what you think about, right? If you're in that person's spot, where did this go?

Sometimes we have stories and narrations from our traditions. It's not a Hadith with the famous narration of Barsisa.

The man who ended up going from a priest or a monk, a worshiper of Allah, and went down this long track of committing adultery and then eventually committing murder and then lying to commit his murder or to cover up his murder.

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