There are some people you meet in life where, even if you don’t know all their details, you can tell one thing clearly: this person is on a mission.
Not a campaign. Not a phase. A mission.
A sentence sits behind everything they do. You see it in their choices, their priorities, the way they spend their evenings, the way they speak to their children, the way they quietly sacrifice comfort for something they believe has to live on after them.
Recently, after the passing of our elder Mohammed Alam رحمه الله, something Maulana Maqsood said in Urdu lodged itself in my mind and hasn’t left since:
“Merey Allah ka ḥukm aur merey Nabi ka ṭarīqah ye kaise dunyā mein ʿām ho jae?”
How can the command of my Allah and the way of my Prophet ﷺ become common in this world?
Not famous.
Not branded.
ʿĀm: normal, widespread, in every house, part of everyday life.
That one line is a whole life mission. It is a summary of what “the reality of responsibility” looks like stretched over decades: a heart that keeps asking, “How do I make Allah’s command and the Sunnah visible, reachable, livable for ordinary people?”
There are people who didn’t just repeat that line; they lived it. People who spent their days setting up masājid, keeping jamāʿat and daʿwah work alive, helping build makātib, supporting ʿulamā’, inviting neighbours, going house to house, year after year. People whose children grew up to be ḥuffāẓ and ʿulamā’, whose grandchildren are now involved in daʿwah and community work in different forms.
Even in his broken English, he kept giving people another version of the same mission:
“Belief for Allah, follow for Prophet and you will be successful. Don’t look at me, do your own research.”
Simple, slightly crooked on the tongue, but straight in meaning. Believe in Allah, follow the Prophet ﷺ, don’t make personalities your religion, study and seek the truth for yourself. That was the message he tried to leave in people’s hearts.
And right near the end, that mission was still there. Two days before he passed, when he briefly regained consciousness, our grandmother (his wife) said he was making duʿā, repeating:
“Allāh mujhey deyr aur dūr ke liye qabūl farma.”
“O Allah, accept me for near and far.”
Even on the bed, the concern was the same: to be accepted as someone useful, for those close by and those far away. Near and far, now and after, he wanted to be someone through whom Allah’s message reached people.
This part is not about praising one man. It is about what his life, and the lives of many like him, are trying to tell us: if you live as a person of a message, your message outlives you. If you don’t, then no matter how busy or loud your life is, it ends when you do.
We, as the next generation, have to decide what kind of people we want to be.
Do we want to be people of moods, constantly reacting to whatever comes up on our screens that day? Or do we want to be people of a message, whose days and years all quietly circle one core concern: “How can Allah’s ḥukm and the way of Muhammad ﷺ become ʿām in my house, on my street, and in my city?”
Being a person of a message doesn’t mean you have to become famous or hold a position. It means a few deep things.
It means you wake up with a direction beyond survival: not just “earn, eat, sleep,” but “how does today push that message a little further?” Sometimes that looks like teaching Qur’an. Sometimes it looks like visiting one family regularly. Sometimes it looks like mentoring one young person, or supporting one masjid project, or starting a simple weekly circle in your living room.
It means you live the message before you speak it. If the Sunnah is not visible in your own home, in how you treat your spouse, children, parents, neighbours, then the big speeches outside ring hollow. Many of our elders didn’t have fancy words, but their houses smelled of dīn. Their children saw tahajjud, Qur’an, dhikr, hospitality, sacrifice. So when those children grew up and chose the path of ḥifẓ, ʿilm, or service, it felt like a natural continuation, not a sudden conversion.
It means you think in generations, not just in projects. If your dream is that Allah’s command and the Sunnah become normal in the world, you immediately realise you won’t see the full result in your lifetime. So you start investing in those who will carry it after you: your children, your grandchildren, your students, your younger colleagues. You let them see your struggles, your tawbah, your service, your love for dīn. You let them feel that this is not your hobby; this is your life.
It means you keep asking, “What am I passing on?” Not just money, houses, and businesses, but what orientation? Will your grandchildren only inherit your stress, your complaints, your frustrations with the community? Or will they inherit a clear sense that, “Our family is here to serve Allah’s dīn in some way, and that’s an honour”?
When you look at those elders whose children are ḥuffāẓ and ʿulamā’ and whose grandchildren are active in daʿwah and khidmah, you are not looking at perfect families. You are looking at decades of certain choices: staying close to masājid, honouring ʿulamā’, making room for jamāʿat and daʿwah people in their homes, giving preference to dīn-based environments over purely dunya-based ones, putting time and money into makātib and madāris instead of treating them as afterthoughts.
The question isn’t, “Can we copy their exact life?” The question is, “What would it look like for us to be people of a message in our time and our context?”
We might not all set up masājid. But can we be part of keeping at least one masjid alive, active, and welcoming?
We might not all travel for daʿwah like they did. But can we be the ones who hold the line in our own neighbourhoods, families, and workplaces?
We might not all become ʿulamā’. But can we raise, support, respect and stand behind those who do, so that our grandchildren still have access to real knowledge?
Living with real impact doesn’t mean doing everything. It means doing the right things, consistently, for a long time, with a clear niyyah.
Maybe this is the question we need to carry from this part:
If someone asked you to put your life mission in one sentence: like,
“How can Allah’s command and the way of my Prophet ﷺ become ʿām in this world?”
or in his broken English,
“Belief for Allah, follow for Prophet and you will be successful. Don’t look at me, do your own research.”
what would your sentence be?
And once you’ve found it, are you prepared to let that sentence rearrange your diary, your spending, your friendships, your ambitions?
Because the reality of responsibility is that it doesn’t just show up on the Day of Judgement as a list of things you did. It shows up in the kind of people you left behind. Did you leave behind children and grandchildren who know that they are part of a chain of people who serve Allah’s dīn? Or did you leave behind confusion about what mattered to you beyond paying bills?
We have already seen what it looks like when someone lives decades with a clear mission: masājid that would not exist without those early efforts, communities that were pulled together, makātib that survived because someone refused to give up, families where dīn is normal across three generations.
Now the responsibility is quietly sliding across to us.
May Allah not let us be a weak link in this chain.
May He grant us a clear sentence to live by, a mission that starts in our own hearts and houses and spreads outwards.
May He make us people of a message, not people of moods, and allow that message to be lived in our children’s and grandchildren’s lives long after we are gone.
And as we remember our elder and others like him, we ask Allah to accept every step they took to and from the masjid, every gathering they helped establish, every invitation they gave, every coin of sadaqah they spent, every home they entered for His sake, every word of daʿwah they spoke, every salāt upon the Prophet ﷺ they whispered, and every duʿā they asked for and every duʿā they made.
May Allah grant them Jannat al-Firdaws, expand and illuminate their graves, and place them in the company of those whom they loved: the righteous, the truthful, the martyrs, the sincere servants of the dīn, the people of masājid and Qur’an. And may He give us a share of that same path of quiet, steady khidmah, so that when our own janāzah is prayed, it will be something that testifies for us, not against us.
And may He make us, in our own way, from those who truly wanted
that His command, and the way of His beloved ﷺ, become ʿām in this world.
