The Passing of Brother Mokhit Hossein

Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim

Salaam Alaikum wa Rahmatullah.

I didn’t know Mokhit Hossein.  I never met him. I  talked to him on the phone a couple of times.  Usually I keep it pretty short.  No, brother, my husband is not home, let me give you his cell phone number….  But Br. Mokhit was a bit talkative so he would always ask about the family and keep me on the line a couple of minutes.  I would hang up the phone with a smile on my face thinking of how he must talk peoples’ ears off.  Now I’m smiling at the memory but close to tears, because I opened up my Facebook page and saw posted on my wall that he had suddenly passed away last night.  Inna lilahi wa inna ilahi rajiuun.

My shock was greater than you might think for someone I didn’t know.  Though I never met him, I already had an idea of his personality.  He had been developing a friendship with my husband since he moved his family to our area a while back.  See, Mokhit was no ordinary man.  He had been a successful businessman up in D.C., but he gave it all up to move out to the country and raise goats.  Yes, goats.  He had a small herd on fifty acres, and just yesterday afternoon, after the Friday prayer, he visited my husband at his warehouse to talk business.  He had crunched the numbers and was wanting to buy more land and expand.  The ideas enthusiastically poured out of him as he talked with my husband.  My husband loves this brother, but was on the way to an auction and couldn’t stay to talk.  He promised they would have to get together soon to talk about business, then he left to go buy and sell.  I’m sure Mokhit left him with a smile on his face, too.

After Sherif came home from the auction, we sat and talked.  He recounted Mokhit’s visit and we laughed about his friend’s tendency to keep talking.  My husband said he looked so healthy, his hands big and callused from the hard work of raising the goats and running the farm.  He was impressed by Mokhit’s organizational skills, by the fact that he wasn’t just bogging off with no plan to raise goats and live the country life, but rather he was wanting to make it a successful business and had lined up the tools to make it work.  He inspired my husband and energized him.  He could see that Mokhit loved what he was doing.

So, here we are.  We slept with kind thoughts of a kind man and woke to the sad realization that his time on earth was only borrowed and that Allah’s Qadr had been fulfilled.  My heart breaks for his wife and children, but I am heartened by the fact that he was loved by many and inshAllah they will be assisted through this fierce time of grief.  InshAllah I’ll do what I can for this man I did not know but whom I love fi sabil Allah because he made my husband smile.