I seek forgiveness from Allah a hundred times a day by sincerely saying astaghfirullah a hundred times a day, then all my sins will be forgiven, this is our tradition. Is that correct?

Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) advised us to make repentance, to seek forgiveness from Allah a hundred times a day, that is what he (ﷺ) did. Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) sought forgiveness and left this as an example for us, that we should also seek forgiveness from Allah regularly, a hundred times a day.

You can divide it up, after each prayer twenty times. But when he said a hundred times, it does not mean, “OK, I have done my hundred, that is it.” Because when we seek forgiveness, it has to be more than just, astaghfirullah, astaghfirullah, astaghfirullah, astaghfirullah … You can get into that mode of astaghfirullah, astaghfirullah, astaghfirullah, astaghfirullahastaghfirullahastaghfirullahastaghfirullahastaghfirullahastaghfirullahastaghfirullah … a hundred times, and then finished. The lip has done something. It became unintelligible syllables. And as they are unintelligible to us, they are not acceptable to Allah.  We have to be sure of that.  And if our lips are just parroting sounds: astaghfirullahastaghfirullahasastaghfirullahastaghfirullah …, and then we say, “But Allah understands what is in our heart!”  OK, what is in our hearts?  You have to ask yourself what is really in your heart when you are saying this?  Is it really astaghfirullah? Astaghfirullah for what? “The sins.” Which sin? “One of them.” Does this work? We are fooling ourselves, isn’t it? We are really fooling ourselves with repentance. If we are not really conscious of what we are seeking repentance from, can we sincerely repent? No, we cannot. This is one of the pillars of repentance, it is what? Sincerity. How can we possibly repent if we are not sincere. So it is doing nothing. People say, “Yeah, we have been doing it for years, I thought this thing works, that was the way I was taught. My parents did that, my uncle did that, everybody was doing it that way.  You mean to say it was not working all these time?” Look at our lives, has this repentance changed anything? So for tawbah to having any real effect, it must be itself real. So this is the starting point. That we have to, prior to Ramadan, during Ramadan, after Ramadan, make sincere repentance to Allah for what we have done, and what we do. Otherwise, it will not happen, we will not achieve the goals of repentance so that Allah would in fact forgive us.

This we have to be certain of, having no doubt because we have a tradition. This is something, you know, the way of tradition is very strong. You have been used to doing things a certain way.  People say, “This is what we all heard, this is what everybody did.” This is something new. Tradition does not like change. When you try to take this back to the rest of your family, they will fight, they will resist. Because it means that it has serious implications. It is saying that there was no forgiveness all of those years before. They will say, “You mean all of those sins are still there? Allah did not forgive us for it?”

And most of us never stop to really reflect on ourselves: we are alive, et cetera. We are just in the flow, and we just go with the flow. That is how we live. This stopping to reflect is something difficult. That is why when we try to make I’tikaf in the last ten days of Ramadan. They say, “What is that for?” To help us cut off from the distraction and just focus on reflection. But what happens when people come for I’tikaf? They bring with them all kinds of things and I’tikaf becomes a picnic. We are camping out in the Masjid. People sitting, chatting and talking. This is the reality, unfortunately, because it is difficult. It is easy to go through the motions of sleeping in the Masjid, the Qur'an is there, you are there with your friends. That is easy. But to really actually stop and reflect, look at ourselves: are we for real? Who are we kidding? We seem to be getting away with it. But, are we?